Anyone here who's disabled or neuroatypical in any way - physical disability, neurological difference, chronic illness, whatever, whether it's mild or more severe - how did it affect your decision to pursue FIRE, and how does it affect the path that you're using to get to FIRE?
I have Tourette's Syndrome, which developed to a noticeable point when I was in university. I'm fortunate that mine is fairly well controlled by a low dosage of medication, and that I've never had coprolalia, so generally my tics are not that annoying to me. But I definitely feel like teenage me, back when I only had one tic (and that only happened occasionally), would have been more willing to stick out an office job for longer. Even back then I found most employed job ideas sounded boring and/or pointless, but I could settle down and do boring/pointless things quite well. These days, in addition to being bored and feeling like I'm failing to work towards my life goals, any office job, or other job where I'm expected to maintain a "professional" image for a whole day, is a tiring effort not to tic too much, because even if I have decided to inform management that I have Tourette's, I'm pretty sure it would be distracting if I did loud verbal tics, so I'm always having to redirect my tics towards relatively discrete physical ones. Therefore, I have even less desire to be in an office all the time than I did before.
That's why I decided to go self-employed, even though it meant I needed to level up my people skills quite a bit if I was going to get customers. I can suppress the tics well enough to appear relatively normal if I only have to meet a client for a few hours, or work in an office for one day. But if I'm there week after week, more and more tics (and other weird aspects of my personality) start to slip through.
I'm pretty sure there's no way I could stick out a full time office job for MMM's 10 years or even Jacob from ERE's 5 years. I want freedom to pursue various things that I think are important, but aren't generally immediately profitable, like writing, and improving my community. Also, I don't want to always have to put on a mask, hiding the real me. But I think I won't be able to reach FIRE in the standard way. So I'm going to make my own way.
