Ask HN: I can't think straight, my life is in limbo, and I want to end it now

Maybe I am just less resilient than most people. Maybe I am sick mentally. Maybe I just don't belong.

For the past 20 years, my life has been a joke. I live in B.C, Canada. A few years ago, I traveled 21 hours by plane to see what my father looked like. He didn't want me, didn't even call me his son. My 9 cousins and 3 aunts/uncles don't know I exist. My grandmother died without knowing I existed. My mother and I have moved 30 times, and I've been doing my best to help provide for our lives.

I made the first big mistake of my life and gave up a full scholarship to law school because I wouldn't be able to provide for my mother. I dropped out of college after 1 year so she (being at such an old age) could have a decent standard of living, and see her happy for once in her life.

Then the second big mistake. I took a massive mortgage and dumped all my savings into this apartment, simply because I knew it was my mother's lifelong dream to have a place of her own and move no longer.

29 days ago, I made a third big mistake. I quit my full-time web development job, because the PM (who had authority because of the messed up hierarchy of the company) decided I was not 100% committed to the job because I was not pulling 80 hours a week (like nobody else in the company) and did not bother to update my LinkedIn profile while I was there. It was impossible to reason/discuss these things with him, and so I quit. I quit with a massive mortgage and a mother to feed despite knowing full well it would be a bad idea. I quit a job without having another one lined up. I quit because my ego couldn't take being taken advantage of.

EDIT: We think we make "mistakes". In reality, they are not mistakes - they are simply the things we logically had to do, given our initial genetic equipment combined with the environment we were born into (everything else is just a logical consequence of these 2). So there's no shame to be had or judgment to be made (judgment is something only uneducated people use).

EDIT 2: If you're feeling depressed, you may also benefit from adequate medication (but you need a shrink to evaluate this point). It can lift you onto a whole new level you may have forgotten it exists.

EDIT 3: And don't forget that every human being has an inherent value which is the same for everyone. You are worth exactly as much as Bill Gates or the slum kid. All the other judgments we make regarding ourselves are just artificial constructs.

EDIT 4: "You would probably benefit" was an error: You will definitely benefit!

Read this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_parent check this subreddit http://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/ and call a help line or talk to some stranger in a park.

Please talk to someone, get help with a shrink.

Second, I can offer you some advice that may or may not be helpful. My father had years of familial strife and issues with his father, brothers, and step mother. One day, after a lot of careful thought, he sat his father down, and told him that he wasn't going to be part of the strife and silly games anymore. My father gave his father a phone number and said "I'll do everything I can to keep this phone number. If you ever really want to talk this stuff out, you can call."

It took about 20 years and a terminal case of brain cancer, but the phone call came. And more importantly, in those 20 years, my father was able to focus on building a family and a career of his own, free of the pettiness, bickering, and abuse of his own family. It's hard to draw a line in the sand and set boundaries. It's hard to admit that a person you love will never give you the praise or acceptance you want so bad from them.

If you do accept it though, and you do draw a line in the sand, I bet you're going to be much better off for it.