Recently learned about "childhood emotional neglect" and it all makes sense now. I am crying.

I know most of you are probably tired of therapy-speak by this point... Sorry.

Since late 2023 my life has been in a rock bottom. I am completely burned out . Have been feeling depressed in a while, initially I kinda ignored it because I thought I can heal eventually and additionally no one--not a single soul--close to me in my life is trustworthy enough to hear about my depression. I always had a feeling that my mother doesn't even understand depression. Heck this made me denial of my depression, I just set it aside, swallow it inside me, pretend that it doesn't exist in the first place, when in reality it is a ticking time bomb.

Looking back, since I was little, I always had that feeling of not feeling comfortable living with my family. I felt that I'd rather be disappear forever than with this family. I always wondered what made me feel this way.

Other than that, I was also a sensitive child. I cry easily. A crybaby, they always call me.

My brother also bullied me too. But somehow my parents never cared. They always told me to "be stronger". Whatever that means. I feel humiliated. I feel weak. Be stronger? That word never meant anything to me. No matter how hard I try to be "stronger", I can not. He always find ways to take advantage of me. He never cared about me.

Eventually I learn about the concept of suicide. At that moment, too, that feeling of wanting to disappear turned into a suicidal thoughts. This was pretty early in my life too, probably around eight years old.

But I ignore those feelings, because, if I told my parent, will she believe me? Assuming she believes it, how will she handle it? Will she blame me? So I never told anyone about this feeling. I bury it deep inside me. Pretended it never existed, because, I thought, my feeling never mattered anyway.

Fast forward. My father passed away. Thankfully I was able to grief in a healthy way. But the effect is clearly still with me now: no one is able to make money for the family, except my mother. So my mother got a job. At the same time, we also lived with my late Dad's mother.

Sadly, she was not a good grandmother to me. She has high blood pressure and seldomly gets mad for unknown reason. This affected me very negatively. This also affected my mother quite badly--she always scared of making her angry. As a result everytime I did something wrong no matter how small it is, I always gets scolded. And sometimes the grandma gets angry too. What my mother don't realize was this affected me very negatively. She at least is an adult. Me? I was only a child. I don't know a single thing.

If that's not bad enough, my mother was also overprotective. I rarely gets to go outside. I rarely gets to hang out with my friends. I'm pretty much inside my home rotting. That was my childhood.

This was the biggest loss to me. I always felt that my teenagehood was robbed away from me. And as a result, I became an anxious kid.

Fast forward to now, I'm a burned out early 20s adult. I'm supposed to be an adult but I feel like I still don't know how to live like an adult.

The only thing I'm really good at is programming. As a form of escape to my depressive years, I tried to contribute some codes, one of them was recently back in December 2024. I made my first pull request into PieFed's code. Shout out to Rimu for being a friendly project owner and also for making a healthy fediverse ecosystem.

I could go on but I think I've typed long enough. Thanks for reading.