It depends on the definition of "successful." By my definition, yes, there was a brief period in my life where I was successful. I measure success by my happiness from life. I don't require much to be happy. All that's needed is appreciable romantic and social progress, along with being content with my environment (location). For the vast majority of my life, I have been a colossal failure obtaining all those things.
Anyway, the highpoint of my life by far was in 2007. I had escaped my miserable exile in rural new england, and was living in sunny southern California, attending a college there on exchange. For the first time in my entire life, I managed to put together a respectable social life from people I met in anime club. Even girls were showing interest in me. I met one who I fell in love with, and she had feelings for me too. The summer of 2007 was the crest of my success, when I spent a lot of time with this girl. We were both huge otaku, so the type of things we'd do were often along the lines of playing JRPGs together all afternoon at each others' place or her taking me to the many Japanese stores that sprinkled the landscape there. It was like being in a dream.
My desires are pretty simple. A loving girlfriend, some good friends, and an environment where I'm happy living. It's not like I require a yacht and private learjet. I was so very close to achieving them. Then it all fell apart in the most destructive and nightmarish way possible. I've written about that part before so I don't really want to get into it again. Suffice it to say, that destruction ensured I will remain a loser and failure the rest of my life. It resulted in me having to move back to rural exile and live with my mom again. I've never been able to escape since for a multitude of reasons, but in the end everything comes down to money. If there had been money, I could have escaped and would have had a chance to maybe rebuild after that crippling destruction. I look at trust fund kids with similar personality and employment shortcomings to me, and they had no problem getting a relationship or social life. It's all about opportunities that are locked behind paywalls.
As far as my professional life went once I got my bachelors, after a brutal first job that I completely flopped at and got fired in less than a month, I was never able to get anything else. I found pretty quickly that I wasted 6.5 years of my life busting my ass for a CS degree that the tech industry laughed off because it was from a rural backwater state college and not MIT, Caltech or Stanford. Maybe I could have made it at a real tech company instead of the clownworld I got fired at, but looking back at it now, I doubt I would have been able to cut it even at a big N. My brain is just not wired to succeed in the realities of modern employment. I believe it's something like over 80 percent of those on the spectrum are unemployable.
In the years since, I have futilely attempted to try rebuilding my social and romantic life online, but it has been a pretty sad existence. I always ran into the money problem and the NEET problem, which made anything I tried fail. At this point, at my age of 40, it's become quite impossible to find girls or friends with my shared interests (anime, gaming), as these interests have a severe age skew of < 25. So trying to recapture the fleeting success I had all those years ago really seems an impossibility now. "Lightning in a bottle" is the perfect applicable phrase here. I'm now far past that point in the game where you turn it off and reload from an earlier save file.
