Venting Conflicted feelings over parents

[losingsteam3141]

I know my parents love and support me unconditionally and that they tried their best to raise me, but I can't help but feel they made me like this and set me on a likely path to end my life. My situations I am in now stem from my childhood and teen years. My mother projected her own problems and insecurities onto me. She talked badly on my friends and their families that lead me to become antagonistic and lose many of them. She would always compare me with my friends and make everything a competition between us. My father is completely antisocial with no friends after high school and seemed to want to escape with my mother away from their home country to the US, isolating me from any meaningful family.


I am an only child and with no other sort of family close to me, grew up alone. I clearly had some problems growing up and suspect I have high-functioning autism, but being immigrant parents, they dismissed any signs they saw, simply giving me a "shy" label. My parents didn't see the importance of having some type of community around me, and seemed content on just having me focus on academics and musical instruments (which I hated). Luckily my mother realized and put me in soccer in the third grade (age 9) , so from then on I had some sort of team experience, but the lack of socialization and belonging was just too much and spread to all aspects of my life. Now it feels like all my problems have been building up leading up to a situation I am in now, where any sort of career is in jeopardy. With hundreds of thousands in debt, I won't be able to pay it back without this career and then I truly know my life is over.


I know I can't put all blame on my parents and they raised me better than many other parents do to their children, but I can't help but feel my path was set by them.

 

[daley]

Does your career choice involve a lot of social interaction?

I am terribly shy myself. I was in academia where you have to be quite social, interacting with other researches
to collaborate on publishing papers. Because of my lack of social skills I could
not progress. So I left.

Then I started to work a regular job that did not require much social skills. Through the years
I managed to build some social skills to the degree
that I can pass as normal. I was even able to give lectures. This took me some time and training though.

I am not sure how fruitful it is to blame parents. Objectively, they might have done things wrong,
but there is not much you can do about that. Resenting them only makes you feel a bit better
by making them the villains, but it doesn't change anything. I resented my father for many years
( see this post for a short story I wrote a about it)
and have only been able to get passed that after some effort into personal growth.

 

[losingsteam3141]

Does your career choice involve a lot of social interaction?

I am terribly shy myself. I was in academia where you have to be quite social, interacting with other researches
to collaborate on publishing papers. Because of my lack of social skills I could
not progress. So I left.

Then I started to work a regular job that did not require much social skills. Through the years
I managed to build some social skills to the degree
that I can pass as normal. I was even able to give lectures. This took me some time and training though.

I am not sure how fruitful it is to blame parents. Objectively, they might have done things wrong,
but there is not much you can do about that. Resenting them only makes you feel a bit better
by making them the villains, but it doesn't change anything. I resented my father for many years
( see this post for a short story I wrote a about it)
and have only been able to get passed that after some effort into personal growth.

Yes it does. Its not so much Im afraid of the social interaction required for my career, but the situation Im in is caused by conflict with people that could potentially get me in trouble with my program and get me dismissed. While I still need more practice on socialization, the situation Im in is not directly related to my career, however I got into this situation and other prior situations due to issues with interpersonal relations.

I agree it does no good blaming parents, especially when there is no malicious intent.