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.