While all this was happening, something far more serious was transpiring beneath the surface, causing a new era to start before the last one had ended. They coexisted for a short time until that defining moment signaled SoC's end, leaving me to face a new and unsettling reality. I was disabled, truly for real.Several months before my final confrontation with Bob I was merely unemployed. In early September I picked up a job filling in for a designer at ASN broadcasting. When I came in the first day, however, I noticed something strange. I had only been there for ten minutes when what had seemed to be customary nervousness began to give way to something else. Within a few hours the tremors began. The surging panic continued and I began to get spasms. Then it broke into Fear. Pure fear. Nothing was happening, nothing was going wrong but slowly a little voice in the back of my head was making itself heard. 'Need to get out. Need to get out!'Why was this happening? Could Berkshire have left wounds this deep? It must have progressed over the Summer, but how could so much damage have happened without me even knowing? I was determined not to go down without a fight and stayed for the rest of the day, but by 7 p.m. I was delirious that I spent a good two minutes pushing on a Pull door in my desperation to escape. That night I rallied the troops for another go, but that morning my entire body seized up in spasms, my brain determined to do what it had to to keep itself out of a situation it feared. There would be no going back.I must have spent all my life wondering if I could ever be like regular people and that day it was answered. I think I knew it all along but I was afraid of what that would mean. Now I had no choice. After getting over the initial shock (and strangely enough, relief) of accepting the disabled status I filed for Social Security. What was worse, my agoraphobia (fear of being places you can't easily leave, fear of leaving the house) had exploded, drastically limiting where I could go and how long I could stay without getting another episode. I had a grand total of two places I could go; home/Beanie's apt or, oddly enough, my old college campus. Everything else had a time limit of about an hour unless I was with Beanie.I picked up a part-time job at the campus with the intention of using the extra money to keep my apartment but it became clear that I couldn't even do that. Even my attempt to work from home failed as it became clear that I was afraid to work under anybody. In the end I had to let my apartment go. Beanie rescued me once again and dropped her apartment too, and grabbing a bigger one down the hall for us both on the condition that I settled. SoC ended and Unemployment learned I could no longer work and cut me off. There was nothing left now but Winter.But don't worry about me. In this darkness a new life was forged, one free of the pain that I have endured my whole life. For the first time ever I am sleeping the Winter away. I sleep up to 14 hours at a time and my days are filled with rampant glorious boredom. Am I lazy? Mayhaps, although my compulsiveness leads to marathon bouts of housecleaning. I don't watch all that much TV but I do spend a good amount of time at my computer. I've begun to draw and write again, and my fantasy world Realspace has entered a time of plenty, one it hasn't seen in years. I no longer work or seek work and so I am liberated from social constraints as well. It is an impressive fear I've developed of being at the mercy of others but one that I can at least take the time to step back and investigate. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if pursuing a life in the working world was distracting me from what I was supposed to be doing all along. At the point I'm writing this I still have no social security, no income, no health insurance and no particular plans for the future besides fulfilling my mission to publish this book. Sometimes I feel guilty, about turning my back on the working world but these results are hard to ignore. Almost all my ailments are in remiss