Title: TL;DR: I&#x27;m a founder who had some success, but now I&#x27;m disabled, can&#x27;t seem to hold down a job.  I&#x27;m close to defaulting on my car.  I am (unsurprisingly) depressed.  I need help but don&#x27;t know where to go.<p>I spent the 2010s as a founder. My company was funded by YC and several others.  We were moderately successful but didn&#x27;t see a meaningful exit.  After my startup failed, I started consulting to pay the bills.<p>In 2018 I started having problems with chronic pain and gradually became less and less capable on the job.  Consulting gigs were letting me go because I couldn&#x27;t keep up. The last time I worked was over a year ago, and I finally exhausted my savings in early June 2022.<p>I live as cheaply as I possibly can at this point.  I live with family and only pay for absolute necessities.  It comes out between $1200 and $1500 per month.<p>I&#x27;m in the US and I have an application in for SSDI, but, from what I&#x27;ve heard, it&#x27;s very hard to get benefits, especially if you have an invisible illness like chronic pain.  It&#x27;s likely that my application will be initially denied and I will have to focus on an appeal.  It could take a year or more of fighting to be approved.<p>I am selling some of my old stuff on eBay but it&#x27;s exhausting and frustrating given my limitations.  It&#x27;s not sustainable.<p>I have a car payment due soon and I&#x27;m already behind by one.<p>Worst of all, my life is pretty drab at this point.  I am obviously depressed. I see a therapist and a psychiatrist but, fundamentally, the source of my depression is the state of my life. I have nothing to look forward to. I can&#x27;t even afford to toss a few bucks into side projects so I at least have something to do with my time... I mostly watch TV, play video games and lurk on the internet. It&#x27;s absolutely soul sucking.<p>I think, given the right environment, I could finish a weekly workload of a bit less than half-time and slowly re-learn how to work again even with my limitations, but no one wants to hire a middle-aged disabled person for part-time work.  Further, all of my experience is in startups and that makes me less palatable to larger companies, but larger companies have more options to accommodate disabled people.<p>I don&#x27;t know what to do. Has anyone in the HN community been here?<p>EDIT: A few people have asked what I’d like to do if I were to work again.  The answer is that I don’t know!<p>Before I started having problems, I was a backend-centric web developer but I’m pretty burned out on that these days.<p>I’ve always wanted to get into embedded, but I have no idea if I can make a lateral move like that in my current state.<p>Whatever I do, it needs to be with someone who will give me the space to try and fail and try again.  That’s really the main thing.<p>Feel free to EMAIL ME:<p>tyvm for the shrimp at gmail dot com
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