I was bullied at 7 and have been homeschooled since

Deleted my last post cause I realised it was hard to understand

I'm 19 and I've been homeschooled since I was 7. I'm now teaching my brothers to read because my parents never cared.

I was 7 when my parents pulled me out. My sister and I were being bullied, and instead of actually addressing it, talking to teachers, other parents, anything, they just decided we'd be homeschooled. That was the end of formal education for me.

For a while, it was fine. We had tutors, old grade 4-6 textbooks, structure. But then my parents stopped caring. They stopped caring a lot. We'd go weeks without classes. Wake up late, watch TV until evening, never go outside. Our entire world became a screen. We'd do our chores and that was more important to them than school.

My brothers never even got that much. They're so much younger that they missed school entirely. And because my parents couldn't be bothered, my brothers couldn't read when they were 12 and 10 years old.

I remember when my uncle called the authorities on us when I was 17. They came to our house. My dad showed them those same torn, messy textbooks from years ago, his defence was that they had "so much information" in them. He'd been promising to buy new ones for years but said they were "too expensive." The authorities left. Nothing changed.

The isolation destroyed me. I became severely depressed. I've never progressed past grade 8 level in maths or sciences. I at least got pulled out after learning how to read. My brothers didn't.

In 2024, I gathered every free resource I could find and built them a curriculum from scratch. Teaching them was brutal. Reading a single paragraph took 2 hours. No exaggeration. I had to teach them everything...phonics, basic maths, how to actually learn.

I saved up money and bought them proper textbooks. At first they couldn't use them. But recently? They've made real progress. They're adding a foreign language now.

They're still a year behind where they should be. But they're doing so much better.

And now I'm hitting a wall. One of my brothers is in grade 8, doing maths I don't understand. I feel stupid and behind. Every time I can't answer his question, I'm reminded of what was stolen from me.

The loneliness is worse than the gap in my education.

When people ask if I'm at university, I panic. I tell them I'm on a gap year. The truth is I'm just someone whose parents failed them. I'm 19, completely dependent on them, with social anxiety so bad that opening up to anyone feels like disappearing.

I joined this subreddit hoping I wasn't alone. And I'm not, which is both comforting and heartbreaking. So many of us have been hurt by parents who couldn't show up.

I'm bitter. I'm stuck. I don't know what to do with myself. But I know my brothers won't end up like me. That's the only thing keeping me going.

Thanks for reading...