“Hollow Pursuits”
Written by Sally Caves
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 3, Episode 21
Original air date: April 30, 1990
Star date: 43807.4
Mission summary
A lieutenant engineer we’ve never seen before, Barclay, is drinking in Ten Forward when La Forge reminds him that he’s on duty. Barclay blows off his superior, then wrestles even Commander Riker into submission and sends the two of them packing, while Counselor Troi looks on avidly. Just as she’s throwing herself at him, he’s ordered to report to one of the cargo bays. Guess they’ll have to pick this up later, which it turns out will be easy as easy as saying “Save program,” because he’s been playing out a fantasy on the holodeck.
Meanwhile, in Cargo Bay 5, the real La Forge is griping about Barclay’s unsatisfactory work ethic with the real Riker, who says it may be time to bring “Broccoli” to Picard’s attention. When Barclay finally arrives, he stutters an excuse and reveals his true self as seemingly bumbling and incompetent. A ruptured container of Mikulak tissue samples–needed to stop an epidemic on their planet–must be disposed of, and shortly afterward, an antigrav unit malfunctions with no discernible cause.
While Barclay tries to get to the bottom of the problem, La Forge and Riker bring their concerns to Picard, citing his worrisome history of “seclusive tendencies.” Picard insists that La Forge work harder to bring Barclay out of his shell and give him a chance, by becoming his best friend if he has to. The reluctant chief engineer gives Barclay more opportunities to show his worth, but the lieutenant continues to disappoint him. He’s shown up by Ensign Crusher in a staff meeting, which sends him back to his refuge in the holodeck, into the waiting arms of his Troi simulation, who in one program becomes his “goddess of empathy.” Ew.
A new mystery soon presents itself: Duffy’s glass starts leaking in Ten Forward. This is no prank–it seems that the molecular structure of the glass has somehow been altered. La Forge tasks Barclay with checking over the ship’s 4,000 power systems to see if they could have caused it, which he was already planning to do in his investigation of the antigrav failure. La Forge credits him with suggesting that the two events are somehow linked.
After Guinan lectures La Forge for judging Barclay because he doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the crew, he looks for the lieutenant, who he naturally finds in a holodeck. Barging into his program, La Forge discovers Barclay’s dirty little secret: another simulation in which he handily defeats Picard, La Forge, and Data in the guise of the Three Musketeers, with Dr. Crusher and Wesley watching on, decked out in Regency clothing.
Barclay is sheepish and ready to hand in his resignation, but La Forge knows a little something about unhealthy holodeck behavior, and they share a Moment.
LAFORGE: Now, as far as I’m concerned what you do in the holodeck is your own business, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work.
BARCLAY: You’re, you’re not going to tell anyone about this?
LAFORGE: I don’t think everybody would appreciate your imagination like I do. It is kind of unusual, recreating people you already know.
BARCLAY: Well, it was just– I needed to blow off some steam because one, one of the officers had been getting on my back.
LAFORGE: Let me guess.
BARCLAY: It was you, and I just couldn’t tell you what I wanted to tell you to your face, so it just sort of got out of control.
LAFORGE: I don’t know. There’s a part of this that’s kind of therapeutic. Maybe you ought to talk to Counselor Troi about it.
BARCLAY: It’s, it’s, I, when I’m in there I’m just more comfortable. You don’t know what a struggle this has been for me, Commander.
LAFORGE: I’d like to help, if I can.
BARCLAY: Being afraid all the time, of forgetting somebody’s name, not knowing what to do with your hands. I mean, I’m the guy who writes down things to remember to say when there’s a party. And then when he finally get there, he winds up alone in the corner trying to look comfortable examining a potted plant.
LAFORGE: You’re just shy, Barclay.
BARCLAY: Just shy. Sounds like nothing serious, doesn’t it? You can’t know.
La Forge looks into a brand new malfunction in one of the transporter rooms and orders Barclay to get some professional help from Troi. Barclay can’t get away from the actual counselor quickly enough; he runs back to his holodeck program, where he naps with his head lying in Dr. Crusher’s lap. And that’s where Riker, Troi, and La Forge find him a short while later. Troi confronts her goddess simulation and Riker encounters a shorter, scrappier version of himself that does not amuse. Awkward.
There’s no time to lay into Barclay for his extracurricular activities, because the matter-antimatter injectors are now malfunctioning and he and La Forge are needed in Engineering. Enterprise is accelerating to dangerous speeds that will tear them apart if they can’t get to the bottom of the shipwide failures in time.
The engineering crewmembers brainstorm possible explanations, but what could cause completely unrelated occurrences like a broken antigrav, a distorted glass, a wonky transporter, and the latest issue with the injectors? They’re baffled, until Barclay’s creativity sparks an unusual idea: The crew is the connection they’re looking for! He posits that they have been transmitting something from system to system that has been disrupting their functions, something the ship’s sensors doesn’t normally pick up.
Some quick work with the computer and they track down the foreign element, invidium, as well as the source: the broken Mikulak container from the beginning of the episode! Then it’s a simple matter of flooding the injectors with some cooling stuff that will freeze the invidium and render it inert–just in time to slow the ship down and save everyone aboard. Phew. “Glad you were with us out here in the real world today, Mr. Barclay,” La Forge says.
Having become a contributing member of the Enterprise crew, Barclay says good-bye to his holodeck Bridge crew and erases all his programs–except love program number nine.
Analysis
I’m afraid I don’t have anything too insightful to say about this episode. I think it’s really only operating on a couple of superficial, but nearly contradictory levels: 1) Indulging your fantasies is bad, and 2) Don’t judge people at face value.
I have to say that I always used to like this episode, but the gags that entertained me when I was thirteen only make me wince now, which perhaps suggests that it’s also operating on a fairly juvenile level. (I’m primarily referring to the holodeck simulations of Deanna Troi, which are about as cringeworthy as anything Quark would have dreamed up in his holosuites on DS9. That isn’t a good thing.) I think many viewers are meant to sympathize with Barclay and his inherent awkwardness–and I remember liking his character, overall, especially in later episodes–but the way he has cast the women in his fantasies doesn’t speak well of him. Yes, it’s his fantasy, but I wish they weren’t so sexual and submissive.
But of course, here I am judging Barclay, just like the others do, and we’re none of us meant to see inside his head this way. So I assume this is part of the point, and it’s intended to make us feel uncomfortable.
So I worry that the message of this episode is that it’s better to live in the real world than a fake one, that there’s something wrong with being introverted and seclusive. This is a troubling takeaway for someone like me who spent a good portion of his childhood in fantasy worlds between the covers of books, not to mention watching shows like this. But it does seem more likely to me that the point, if there is one, is to exercise moderation–that the fantasies shouldn’t interfere with living your actual life, and perhaps there’s some value in that.
Barclay doesn’t delete his programs because there’s something wrong with them or with him, but because he doesn’t need them anymore; he’s finding his place outside the holodeck with the rest of the crew, and perhaps learning to respect his shipmates more, as demonstrated by his admission to Geordi: “The people I create in there are more real to me than anyone I meet out here, except maybe you, Commander.” And he isn’t giving it all up entirely, since he holds onto program nine, whatever that might be.
It’s also worth noting that this episode doesn’t paint the rest of the crew in the best light either, particularly with their nickname for Barclay and their lack of respect for his privacy. The cracks in Roddenberry’s perfect future are showing, and it turns out that the Enterprise officers are human after all.
The B-plot isn’t anything new either: Mysterious malfunctions on the ship that put them all in danger. Yawn. I don’t even think the reveal that the broken cargo container was responsible is much of a surprise, nor the plot development that Barclay comes through in the end, though the diagnosis and solution aren’t necessarily predictable.
In the end, this seems rather one-note and less enjoyable or interesting than it seemed before I grew up.
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 3 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: It seems pretty clear that the outfits on the holodeck are supposed to be cheesy and awful, and Wesley’s is the best of the lot. The pie is a particularly nice touch.
Best Line: PICARD: Broccoli?
RIKER: Young Mister Crusher started that. I guess it’s caught on.
PICARD: Let’s just get that uncaught, shall we?
Trivia/Other Notes: This was Dwight Schultz’s first of many TNG appearances as Reginald Barclay, a role he would even reprise on Star Trek: Voyager. He was a lifelong fan of Star Trek and was recommended for a part by Whoopi Goldberg.
Wesley’s holodeck outfit was modeled after Thomas Gainsborough’s painting “The Blue Boy.”
Barclay mentions a “flux capacitor” to holo Troi, though he may have meant to say “flow capacitor.”
Geordi refers to his holoprogram of Leah Brahms in “Booby Trap,” and O’Brien and Worf will reminisce about this episode in DS9’s “Image in the Sand.”
Previous episode: Season 3, Episode 20 – “Tin Man.”
Next episode: Season 3, Episode 22 – “The Most Toys.”
I’m a bit conflicted about this episode. In itself it isn’t all that bad (Warp 3 is probably fair), but Barkley just became worse and more embarrassing with every appearance, and that affects how I view this appearance. We talked a bit about Barkley at Ten Forward, though that was more of a Dwight Schultz vs. Brad Dourif thing. He’s really cringe-worthy, though here he presents a valid question. Later, you have to wonder how he got into the impossible to enter Academy in the first place.
Barkley’s various Trois are supposed to be over the top. The Goddess of Empathy version is really close to a lot of fan snark about the character at the time. This may actually be the point at which Deanna Troi turned the corner and started to improve as much as she ever would. That turning point also provides the episode’s most redeeming moment. After she gives Riker that little speech about his height being intimidating and so on after seeing his midget replica, she is suddenly confronted with her own version and snaps, “Shut it!” It’s hilarious and is almost an acknowledgement by the writers of what has been wrong with the character to this point.
Flux capacitor is nonsense, but it may be what was written in the script. It certainly became a standard piece of the technobabble. Or the name might have been retconned. It wouldn’t be the only time. Both the names of the Klingon ceremonial sword and the Cardassian name of the station that became DS9 were retconned because actors had problems pronouncing the original terms.
I think this episode rather tidily handles one of the more “clear and present dangers” of holo-deck technology. Some parts of this episode are downright cringeworthy, far worse than any “holo-monster” or “holo-mystery.”
It also handles what I presume is a pre-occupation of the writers at this point—namely that there is no “everyman” in Roddenberry’s universe. Where every one is special and spectacular, Barkley is an underachiever (still, a whiz). Here, they give us one. I do like how in the end, it appears Barkley’s confusion is not because he is particularly dull-witted but because the problem he’s working on presents a larger challenge beyond the scope of what he’s been tasked to do.
I guess what I’d say about this episode is, despite its hand-wavey denouement, TNG finally gets REAL.
“I told you that story to tell you this one.” (Bill Cosby) (back when he was funny)
Seriously, about the only thing I really like about this episode is that it establishes the character of Reginald Barclay and therefore set up the only really good episode he was in, “The Nth Degree”, which I really like. It’s not that “Hollow Pursuits” is bad exactly; if nothing else I like the idea of showing us a character who is flawed in a moderately believable way and who is allowed to come back in future episodes, so he’s not just some one-off aberration magically cured by the end of the episode so we never have to see him again.
What bothers me most about “Hollow Pursuits” is that it has no courage. There’s a deliberately sanitized feel to it. I’m reminded a bit of what happened to The Stepford Wives when it was adapted to the screen: William Goldman pointed out that if you’re sick enough to accept a robotic replica of a woman as a wife, you’re probably going to make that robot into a sex bomb who “look[s] like Bo Derek” (in Goldman’s words.) Instead the screenwriters, shying away from the true darkness of the premise, made the robotic women into simpering, sexless, suburban hausfraus who wouldn’t be out of play on “The Donna Reed Show”. The idea is not totally without merit but it’s still a bit cowardly.
Similarly, Barclay’s holodeck fantasies feel just a bit too cutesy and tame to be entirely believable. Someone who really lived for the holodeck and used it to invent versions of his crewmates, whether to satisfy lust or envy, would probably go quite a bit further with it than the essentially harmless Walter Mitty-ish inventions we see in “Hollow Pursuits”. Wasn’t there a “Voyager” episode that actually went the full length with this concept and gave us something truly unsavory?
A last comment: hearing Capt. Picard accidentally utter the word “Broccoli” in his impeccable enunciation was priceless.
I used to loathe this episode. I never took a shine to Barclay, I thought the holofantasies were weird and off-putting, and I didn’t get why this guy was even on the Enterprise in the first place. But I have to say that watching this now later in life, having had a lot more work experience, it reads VERY differently for me.
Both Geordi and Riker are TERRIBLE BOSSES. I really cannot emphasize that enough. They are too overbearing and too micromanage-y. They sigh and roll their eyes and display active contempt for their employee. They even set up Barclay to fail, by deliberately asking him to come to a meeting and then putting him on the spot to present something he doesn’t know a lot about, and not giving him a chance to answer as Wesley just leaps in. They are needlessly cruel to him behind his back to others, and they have no respect for his privacy or sensitivity to the crippling social anxiety that they’ve obviously contributed to.
I’ve been blessed to have had largely positive work experiences, but it just reminds me of every horrible work situation I’ve ever had, and it makes me seriously uncomfortable. People have a right to be treated with respect in the workplace, even if they’re not that good at their jobs (which isn’t even the case here). And a good manager will find out that person’s strengths and weaknesses and give him tasks he’s best suited to. A bad manager will use words like “poor fit” to deflect his own terrible management. Watching this is cringe-inducing to me today not because of Barclay, who is admittedly a sad sack, but because watching Geordi and Riker dismiss, insult, and belittle him is like watching kids bully kids (or worse, adults bully adults, which happens everywhere).
My biggest complaint with this story, though, is that it’s not just socially awkward weirdos who have problems with bosses. Normal people have to deal with this kind of crap all the time, and I think it belittles the severity of Geordi and Riker’s failures to have poor Barclay be the victim. Also, neither of them suffer actual consequences for the way that they treat him.
As for the holoprogram, I’m of two minds with this. On the one hand, telling off your boss and successfully flirting with people is probably at the top of most people’s fantasies. I remember in Minority Report, there’s a throwaway scene where the main character walks through the equivalent of Quark’s holostudios and it’s people 1) telling off people they hate; 2) getting praise from their bosses that they never get; and 3) having amazing sex. This 100% makes sense to me as plausible. And I’m firmly of the opinion that no one should be judging Barclay for it, either. It’s really important to vent frustrations about work, and since he has basically no friends, what else is he supposed to do? On the other hand, I think your coworkers’ actual likenesses should be off-limits, and Barclay in doing what he does isn’t respecting them as people either. I’d prefer the equivalent of a TV movie, with the disclaimer at the end that these are totally not meant to be real people but obviously are.
But you know, at least it did give me enough of a quick factor in both directions to get me thinking, which is more than I can say about a lot of these lukewarm episodes.
Warp 3
I’ll piggyback on what Torie’s said here: the thing that gets me with this episode is how much it fails to sympathize with, or even remotely understand, the “everyman” that it tries to create.
Look, I always had a certain affinity for Barclay. When this was on TV, it was because I was an awkward kid-then-teenager who’d moved around too much as a child to have or learn how to keep close friends. But now, as Torie’s said, it’s because of all the workplace dynamics that are on display here and which have never been seriously considered in Trek.
Even the most awesome job in the world is still a job, and you still have to do stupid menial tasks, and deal with petty social competition and politics, and jockeying for position with your coworkers, and your Performance Review, and blah blah blah. Barclay’s not invested in his job because, contra everybody else we ever see on the show, he’s doing stupid scutwork. For him, solving the problem isn’t as simple as pushing buttons to Run a Level One Diagnostic or asking the computer a huge broad research question; he actually has to take things apart and do some actual work. And that’s hard, and you can screw it up.
Younger-me sneered at Barclay’s lack of skill; but older-me knows from experience that bad management is precisely the reason that Barclay fails. He’s been set up to fail by a management team that terrorizes him, rendering him too nervous to work well. This team is run as a clique from which Barclay’s excluded, making him a perpetually low-status outsider: Wesley can talk over him precisely because Barclay knows himself to be the lowest-ranking individual in the group, and thus has to delay longer before speaking and yield the conch to any higher-status group member. Of course this prevents Barclay from getting credit for his good ideas and gaining status, too.
Meanwhile Geordi judges him on whether or not he’s a “go-getter” or whatever–armchair psychoanalysis being the refuge of the manager who has no idea how to set clear, objective metrics for judging workplace performance.
As a result, Barclay’s spending so much of his mental energy worrying about what other people think of him and how he can never seem to please his superiors that he literally does not have the focus left to do any of the rest of his job. I sincerely wish I didn’t know from experience exactly what that feels like.
The other part that all this makes blindingly obvious is how much all Our Heroes spend all their waking lives on the bridge, and barely ever sleep. How dare the show blame Barclay for not extending him the same magic power?
Strangely enough this episode put into my mind ‘The Tempest’
ARIEL
…That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROSPERO
Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL
Mine would, sir, were I human.
I have also been fascinated by this exchange. A spirt, an alien intelligence shows real empathy for human’s suffering, and through it a human relearns his empathy even for his enemies.
The stalwart crew of Enterprise D always are full of empathy for aliens and strange life-forms, but lack it utterly for one of their own. Like the wardroom of the Caine they made up nicknames for him, ragged him behind his back, and wondered why he went to pieces.
I have always identified with Barclay in this episode. I am that person at the party looking at the plant. The analysis that this is an example of petty bosses and office politics is dead one.
AND it has a friggin big plot hole. Tori is an empath, wouldn’t she known that Barclay is becoming attracted to her?
I always get the feeling watching this that I do when watching “the Cage/The Menagerie”. Too much indulgence in fantasy can be a bad thing. Of course, when “the Cage” was written there was no such thing as a “Trekkie”, but by the time of TNG, we were of course, well known.
Do you suppose this was a none-too-subtle message from the writers to the viewing public; ‘TV is fine once in a while, but there’s a world out there. Go out and do something’. Or as Vina said; “…it’s like a narcotic. Because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up building, travel…you just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.” Prescient words for the television / video game generation indeed.
I agree that Barclay is meant to be the “everyman” character, but I kept circling around the idea that he’s like a Mary Sue in fiction (or Gary-Stu, I guess?)–living out the dream of people like us getting to be on the flagship of the Federation, only no one likes him and he isn’t awesome. Sure, he ends up saving the ship in the end, but even though he feels more positive at the end and is ready to live in the real world, I wonder how much things will change for him. He and Geordi seem to be on the way to becoming friends, but does he end up being the guy that everyone only tolerates having around? This is depressing, and I’m even more depressed that the way he’s presented in the show is so skewed that *I* end up not liking him much either.
Even though the judgment goes both ways, most notably with Guinan chiding Geordi, the overall thesis is there’s something wrong with Barclay, not everyone else–and certainly not with the system that put him in this awkward position. Sometimes I worry that the people at my job think I’m antisocial or not a team player or something because I stay in my office and don’t have lunch with them more often or go out for drinks, when really, I just want to read a book in my limited free time or have to write on my lunch break. It can be exhausting for an introvert to be around people all the time, so I can see the appeal in napping in the holodeck or hanging out with holograms who don’t expect anything from you except what you’re willing to give.
On the other hand, I think your coworkers’ actual likenesses should be off-limits, and Barclay in doing what he does isn’t respecting them as people either.
I’m not sure I agree with that, since no one was ever supposed to see those programs! Is it wrong to fantasize about other people if it isn’t causing them harm? This is just an extension of that.
I sometimes wonder if the purpose of Barclay is to make people who identify with him feel better about themselves. I can certainly relate to Barclay’s shyness and awkwardness in social circles but I can’t see myself having fantasies about my co-workers if I had access to a holodeck. In that sense, I can always tell myself that at least I’m not that bad and use that as a foundation for the hope that were I lucky enough to serve on Enterprise then I’d be more successful socially.
So yeah, I always kind of liked Barclay, even if the acknowledgement of why makes me a little embarrassed. I may be screwed up but at least I’m not Barclay screwed.
Wasn’t the flux capacitor the power source for the time traveling DeLorean in Back to the Future?
@10 Dovakliina
Yes, indeed! I think he flubbed his line and they either missed it or decided to leave it in, because he pronounces it correctly elsewhere in the episode. Technobabble is hard.
If shy persons like Barclay are considered to have a pathology (shyness is now viewed as “social anxiety” — I’m with Christopher Lane on this) then the Federation and especially Starfleet ought to have accommodations in place to ensure that people like him can use their unique skills and do the job they want/were hired to do without being forced to be gregarious and social. Surely there’s a Federation Citizens With Disabilities Act.
A core idea in Star Trek is that in the future, people are accepted no matter how “different” they may be. The range of what is considered human normality will have been widened. Extremely. I know it is always a hazard when you’re portraying a 23rd century world in the 20th century, but the purpose of Star Trek has always been to think ahead and try to do just that.
In short, what happens to Barclay on the Enterprise is nothing but good old 20th-century bullying and it’s portrayed as being for his own good. And it’s none of anyone’s business what he fantasizes on the holodeck.
I don’t judge Barclay on his fantasies, and saying they “don’t speak well of him” seems unfair, because anyone with half a brain has indulged in some wild fantasizing in his or her life, including those that aren’t socially acceptable. That’s why they are fantasies.
I also don’t judge Barclay for including his co-workers in those fantasies. I’d be surprised if anyone here has never fantasized about someone they knew. We can be high and mighty and say we’d never privately bring those types of fantasies to life in a holodeck-type device, but that’s easy for us to do, because those devices don’t exist.
At any rate, it’s only an issue because no one seems to respect other people’s privacy in the 24th century. If you need to interrupt a holodeck program you should end it before you go waltzing in, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t complain about what you find. Like my mother used to say, if you eavesdrop on others, what you hear is your fault.
Barclay’s only problem is his punctuality, and that’s really just a symptom of his extreme social awkwardness, massively exacerbated by, as Torie and others have said, his bosses. Riker should be enforcing discipline, but he’s an ass about it from the very beginning of the episode. It might have played better if we’d seen him trying to work with Barclay before he ultimately loses his cool.
He and LaForge calling Barclay derogatory names behind his back is not only wrong but, in my opinion, glaringly out of character. I was glad to see Picard and Data put an end to that behavior, even if the captain later accidentally repeats the name with disastrous results. Given that this is how Barclay’s treated on board the Enterprise, it’s no surprise that he hasn’t been putting forth his best effort and chooses to spend as much time as he can get away with in isolation, as Guinan thankfully brings up.
I think this episode would have been better than average if they’d dropped the seemingly obligatory crisis and just focused on the character conflicts. It might have even been a neat idea if LaForge had secretly created a crisis for Barclay to solve, thereby giving him a chance to prove his worth in front of the rest of the engineering crew, though it would have had to be something less potentially catastrophic or there’d have been hell to pay.
P.S. They couldn’t find one sword fighting stuntman with a receding hairline?
Well of course nobody respects anybody’s privacy in the 24th century… Facebook has been around for what, 300 years??
A lot of excellent comments here. I found this episode to be compelling because of the social phobia obviously afflicting Reg [which I suffer from] and the incongruously ignorant behaviour of his colleagues, and had to find out what the name of it had been, and find a site to watch what I missed after falling asleep in the last 15 minutes.
A few quick points;
Primarily, what separates a “socially awkward weirdo” from a “normal” person is degrees of confidence. They are not different in kind, only in degree.
For one commenter, to be ‘Barclay screwed’ [reduced to using fantasy to compensate for low status] is a thankfully avoided worst-case scenario. Here’s a worse one, which happens to be mine; horror of all the “petty social competition and politics, and jockeying for position with your coworkers” made me physically sick, so I’m out of the whole shit storm, on disability and miserable. Whether my life’s been ruined remains to be seen. All this because of social anxiety. I can categorically state from bitter experience that unfortunately terror looks to the un-anxious “weird” and is not only inexplicable, but unspeakable and unthinkable. What this means is that there is such a stigma on low status that there’s a systemic mechanism in place that finishes outsiders off completely in the end. As an old book title says, fear is the key.
If I were in his place, I’d be doing anything BUT indulging in fantasies involving my unwitting persecutors. I’d be watching therapeutic Star Trek on late night TV- wait though… this IS Star Trek…. maybe Star Trek staff in crisis could resort to 20th C shows like The Office. God help them.
@15. ; I may not suffer from he crippling social phobia you seem to have, but I can definitely identify and sympathize with your ‘horror” over ” all the “petty social competition and politics, and jockeying for position with your coworkers”.
I definitely hate all of that stuff and I’m sure my dislike of competition has held me back in life. I hope you are able to find something ( therapy, medication, etc. ) which can help you.
Best of luck.
@bedeebdeebdeebthat’s – I don’t have exactly what you have, but I am mildly autistic and can only take so much in-person social interaction, plus all the office politics I could never comprehend. That is one of many reasons I went into business for myself. I was also able to find a couple of jobs where I could work on my own and not have a lot of other people around. Have you considered taking distance learning classes and finding a career in some field where you could work from home? This is entirely possible today. Engineering drafting and architectural design, for instance.