Hikikomori 引き籠り -- Acute Social Withdrawal Syndrome 痛烈社交引き籠り症候群

In a bit of situational irony, cosmic irony, or, perhaps, mere coincidence,  my wife's aunt has asked me to translate some informational material for a service group she is involved with. 

As far as I know, they don't yet have a web site, so I can't link it here yet. But it's a group of volunteers in Kasai City (加西市), formed to support parents and guardians of individuals with disabilities  particularly hikikomori (引き籠り) class disabilities.

I could well be said to be one who has suffered from this "malady". 

I took a six year break from college, trying to complete two assignments in a way that would have essentially produced a more advanced free operating system than Unix with a systems programming language much more advanced than C. (I started this easy little project some five or six years before Linus started his thing with the Linux kernel using the GNU project's free C compiler toolchain, gcc.)

Friends and relatives thought I wasn't working. It's true I wasn't making money. 

Friends and relatives thought I was holed up in my grandfathers' attic. I got out and about quite a bit. I just didn't get out to go punch a timeclock. And I did often spend sixteen hour stretches up on the second floor, trying to work through the reasons the system and language I was trying to develop kept hitting resource requirement walls and internal contradictions. 

Well, and I actually produced some useful stuff while I was up there, too, just never had a way to get it out into the real world where people could use it.

That wasn't the first time, and it wasn't the last.

Recently, I spent a couple of years trying to write a novel while I was trying to find someone who would hire me, then recovering from an accident while trying to write a novel while trying to find someone who would hire me.

Even now, I'm in a sense withdrawn from society, using my muscles to do things I've never done before to make rent instead of using what skills I have to make a real living. While trying to write a novel instead of falling asleep when I get home.

Why? Because the "external society" that I have access to keeps telling me they really, really don't want me to do the things I can do, and demanding that I do things I can't.

And that, in a nutshell, is why people withdraw from society.

(Yeah, life does have a way of pushing and stretching us in ways we don't want. I know that But that is no excuse for us to add to each other's problems. There is a difference between pushing and stretching, and squishing and breaking. And when we undertake to judge others' efforts, we tend to squeeze people until they break. And then they pull back, if they can. Or die.)

I need to finish that translation. Then maybe I'll translate this post into my hackish Japanese. Or maybe I'll get back to my novels. Or just keep falling asleep.