Very long vent/life story, need to get this stuff off my chest anywhere right now, I'm having an autoimmune flare and my head is all over the place 😭 if anyone relates to any of this, I'd LOVE to hear your own experiences, it's been really comforting to find this subreddit and see that maybe my life isn't completely my fault.
I just feel like I'm going crazy reflecting on my unschooled childhood. I had ONE friend in my state who I would get to see once or twice a month. My parents thought this and "unschooling conferences" (aka 5 days of playing with other unsocialized kids in a hotel every 5-6 months) was enough socialization. I would daydream and dream about those conferences fucking constantly because I wanted just to be with other kids so badly. I was so lonely I would regularly cry my eyes out to my parents because all I wanted was one neighbor to play with. I've had severely crippling anxiety for as long I can remember, and I would STILL somehow work up the courage to ask my parents if they could please take me anywhere that I could meet other kids, and then when I'd express any nerves or say that I didn't wanna go because of my anxiety, they'd immediately fold and tell me "oh we shouldn't go then it's fine", and then I'd sit around alone and anxious for another few months, on repeat. Dude I was a fucking child, I literally couldn't be rational 😭 it was THEIR fault for isolating me and coddling to the point that I couldn't talk to any other human being without a panic attack. But as a kid, I thought I was just stupid or inept at my core. I was never pushed out of my comfort zone and I am incapable of doing normal adult things at 22 because of it.
I remember more than once begging them to even just ask me to do chores or to help me get up in the morning, because I would reguarly spend like 8 hours in bed, and be unable to find the motivation to get up, from the fatigue of just sitting around and playing roblox every day. They would say, and I remember this so vividly, "we can't MAKE you do anything, it hurts us to force you". ???????? 😭 I was a child just asking for some basic help.
Thank god I met my boyfriend through a mutual online friend. He's a well adjusted college human and he was able to show me that school kids aren't evil (really wild that this was put into my head btw, I was meant to think that any kid who went to school was inherently mean or worse than us unschoolers, or that they just "wouldn't understand us" in some weird way. Feels extremely cult-y looking back on, but a lot about unschooling feels that way to me now!!). We've been dating almost 4 years, and we live in different states, but we take flights to see eachother every few months. We just got a cat together and hopefully we'll be living together in the next year or two. He's changed my life, I was able to push myself through the panic attacks to fly alone to a different state because of him. I'm still struggling, but I feel so much more free because of him, when we're visiting eachother I'm able to experience the world without my parents judgemental, stressful attitude.
I'm going to be mourning the middle and high school experience that I was robbed of for the rest of my time on this earth, and the constant loneliness--among hundreds of other things from this childhood--has been extremely traumatic. But no matter how incapable, or stupid, or uneducated I feel, from the fact that I wasn't formally educated on ANYTHING (I am probably on a 3rd grade level with most academic subjects), alongside having almost no in-person social skills, I fucking refuse to let the same thing happen to me with college. I'm currently working on getting my GED over the summer, and then I'm going to college. I don't care if I try my best and fail every class, I'm doing it, to at least have tried. I deserve to be able to meet people and have the somewhat normal fucking 20s experience that I want before it's too late for this too.