TL;DR: I'm a founder who had some success, but now I'm disabled, can't seem to hold down a job. I'm close to defaulting on my car. I am (unsurprisingly) depressed. I need help but don't know where to go.

I spent the 2010s as a founder. My company was funded by YC and several others. We were moderately successful but didn't see a meaningful exit. After my startup failed, I started consulting to pay the bills.

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't keep up. The last time I worked was over a year ago, and I finally exhausted my savings in early June 2022.

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.

I'm in the US and I have an application in for SSDI, but, from what I've heard, it's very hard to get benefits, especially if you have an invisible illness like chronic pain. It'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.

I am selling some of my old stuff on eBay but it's exhausting and frustrating given my limitations. It's not sustainable.

I have a car payment due soon and I'm already behind by one.

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'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's absolutely soul sucking.

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.

I don't know what to do. Has anyone in the HN community been here?

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!

Before I started having problems, I was a backend-centric web developer but I’m pretty burned out on that these days.

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.

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.

Feel free to EMAIL ME:

tyvm for the shrimp at gmail dot com