Something no one really tells you about growing up is that once you start to figure out who you are (or maybe more importantly, who you /aren't/), it is then your responsibility to pursue that for yourself. Instead of wallowing in hate for what you are not and what you feel forced to contend with by circumstances or Life or your parents or whatever.
For a lot of people this is something like sexuality or gender or how the world sees them but for me most of these feels are wrapped up in being pretty smart and then being denied an education (because I have shitty parents who do not value education and live in a shitty society that grossly overpriced education in order to keep it as a form of class privilege). So then I struggled for years just trying to get to a point where I could go to school, and when I finally did I freaked out because I had this perception of school being some fantasy idea of academia instead of watching Discovery Channel documentaries and reading checklists. No, it really is just about credentialism, especially undergrad. Thank you, that will be $60,000. I bailed in less than a semester and am now on a waiting list for a trade school.
After that I decided that all my learning-for-fun projects that I'd always done ("Hell yeah I'm going to learn this extremely difficult language/read these boring history books/do epic questing for primary sources just to satisfy this curious urge/write 30,000 words on a niche topic and then share it with a forum of other nerds in my spare time!") were far more valid as education than the expensive piece of paper. It sort of sucks I can't apply any of this knowledge to working in a relevant field, but then again, I'd be pretty pissed if I had a master's in history and museum studies and the only job I could get was 33k a year at the Barbie museum. No disrespect to those who are there, it's just not for me.
Sometimes I think this is without a doubt the worst of all possible worlds and I am stuck in some specially-crafted hell made just to destroy my soul. But as I grow up and grapple with the reality of my elderly family getting ready to pass on and not recognize at all the extent to which their tyrannical whims controlled my earlier life, I'm coming to new conclusions, like: I can just do what I want without making it anyone else's business. Just because I have zero-to-negative interest in what constitutes most normal American life doesn't mean I have to be vicious and mean about it. I can just... move on. I don't even have to make a big deal about it, it is simply not for me, and eventually I'll construct a new world full of things and experiences and people who actually are for me.
