(NC’d for privacy reasons)
I’m a 25 year old woman and grew up living a very sheltered life. I was diagnosed with autism as an adult (paid for assessment myself privately) and also have clinical depression.
Until last year, I had always lived at home with my parents. I went to a local university so never bothered moving out, and as you can imagine despite being in my twenties I always felt less mature, like I lacked ‘life experience’ compared to other people my age.
My life before involved going to work, come home to chat with parents, help with house chores and watch TV. I regularly felt lonely and lacking purpose, I would barely go ‘out’ because I had no plans or people to go with.
I finally moved out a year ago for a new job, and live in a big city - roughly 3 hours away from my parents home town.
Doing so has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, my biggest regret was not doing this sooner. I’m still slightly socially awkward but I have tried so many new experiences that I hadn’t done before and managed to make more new friends (struggled befriending new people before etc). I regularly have plans and things to look forward to on the weekends for example.
My parents hold quite traditional views for women. It’s a norm in my culture to live with grandparents for example, arranged marriage and married women will regularly move in with their in-laws.
My parents were surprisingly accepting of letting me move out alone as a single woman but it’s becoming increasingly apparent they only wanted me to do this temporarily and expect me to move back home and focus on saving money and getting married (in their eyes, ‘growing up’).
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of savings because I earn less than 30k and as we all know rent/ living costs are expensive. I get by comfortably though. Renting is less common in my culture unless absolutely necessary because of ’paying someone else’s mortgage’ - living with parents doesn’t have a stigma.
Selfishly, I really don’t want to leave this new life I have created. What I love about the people I’ve met here is that I no longer feel like my worth as a woman is solely down to whether I am married with kids or not, and that I have a ‘respectable’ job.
I work in PR which is another disappointment to my parents because they think the pay is too low and my career progression is less straight forward.
I currently go home to see them once every 3 months (I pay the expensive train fares) and they complain it’s not enough. I even get messages guilt tripping me for not coming home
Every single time I go back to my home town I feel my depression flares up and I feel so sad for the girl I used to be. I genuinely feel there are little to no positives from seeing my family anymore.
I hate that I’m so sensitive but going back to see family reminds me that in their eyes I’ve failed as a woman, which really hurts.
I can’t help but think how free I would feel if I didn’t constantly have this worry of my ‘old’ life coming back.
It sounds cheesy but despite previously trying many different medications for my depression, what has actually made a huge improvement to my mental health is moving away from family and having new friends who don’t judge me.