I feel emasculated.

Edit: I realize that this post might sound like a rich-kid problem, but please hear me out first.

Edit2: The responses to this have made me feel a lot better. Knowing that there are other people in my situation has also made me want to think about this more clearly. Since I'm still in college, I think I'll wait a couple more years before I take any serious steps. I'll also see if I can get back in contact with my ex. Thanks guys!

I feel emasculated. Being an only child, I was never allowed to leave the house on my own growing up or even enter the kitchen until I was 16 years old. I had to threaten to kill myself after 10th grade in order to be allowed to go out alone. I'm 21 now and even today my mom insists on putting up the mosquito net over my bed for me because I might not be able to do it myself. I barely know the city that I live in and my parents insist that I take the car (we have a chauffeur) wherever that I want to go. I wanted to go on a trip with my friends over the summer and I don't think I would have been allowed to do that if I hadn't agreed to be driven there by our chauffeur. My parents have more or less controlled every aspect of my life since I was born and when I went to college, I realized that I was completely unprepared for the real world. I have no initiative or self-drive because I'm used to my parents doing everything for me. Even my college applications were controlled by my Dad and he insisted on picking all the colleges that I would be applying to. I don't remember a time when I had made an important decision about my own life and now I feel like I don't know how to do that anymore.

I can't talk to my peers because I always feel inferior to them and I cannot relate to the experiences that they like to talk about: I never went on a single school trip because my parents were scared something would happen to me, I never had a sleepover at a friend's place and I never went on any trip in my life where my parents weren't with me. I've been going to college abroad for the last couple of years and I realized that I don't even know how to buy a plane ticket from Bangladesh because they've always done it for me. But the thing is, I have a life that most other people in the world can only dream of. I have free food, free clothing, free lodging in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the country, I get to go to my destinations in an expensive jeep, I am getting an education worth a quarter of a million dollars for free at the age of 21. I should be the happiest guy on the planet. But I feel like a bird that was born and raised in an expensive cage and now doesn't know how to fly and is too old to learn. Once or twice a month, I have a dream that I'm about to kill myself. I wake up and start crying when I realize that it was only a dream and that, in reality, I can't do it. Existence is pain for me and the best times of my life are usually those dreams where I can at least pretend that I'm going to die and stop the pain. But I know that that would cause excruciating, unbearable grief to my parents and I don't want to hurt them. They don't understand me at all and still think that I'm the same 6-year-old that they used to drop off at school.

It's clear that my parents love me a lot, but I'm starting to wonder whether they actually care about my happiness or whether they only love the idea of me that they have in their heads. Their decisions are always based on my financial solvency and they don't seem to care about my feelings or my dignity. They prevent me from making even small decisions fearing that  I might make a mistake instead of letting me learn via experience. Because I had to spend so much time stuck at home without a lot of interaction with the outside world (except for my teachers), I never learnt how to speak to people or adults when my parents weren't around. Now that I'm an adult and most of the people that I know are adults, I don't know how to talk to them. Most conversations that I have with people just end up being awkward or with my saying something offensive or dumb. I no longer like talking to other people. I get tired if I'm in the same room as someone else for more than 30 seconds and I always yell at my family to leave me alone. This is normal if you're 15 but I'm 21 years old and most of my peers don't demonstrate this kind of behaviour anymore. My mom tries to control every aspect of my life and whenever I try to learn to do something like buy my own clothes, she just tells me that won't be able to do it. All my life, I've been told that I won't be able to do things (except for academics). I won't be able to do this, I won't be able to do that. It was never, 'Let me teach you how to do it,' or 'I'll show you how to do it when you're older,' she always told me that I 'won't be able to do it', like I was weak or disabled. That is how I felt as I grew older. I felt like I was weaker than others. Last week, we were in Khulna and our train on the way back got delayed. So my aunt's chauffeur who was driving us there asked me if I wanted to go with him to the bus stand to buy tickets. My mother immediately cut him off before I could answer and said that she would go with me. She made me feel like I wasn't even capable of talking to someone else on my own or of buying some bus tickets. She ended up buying the tickets herself. So, I'm a 21-year-old who has never bought bus tickets in Bangladesh. I say Bangladesh because I buy bus tickets in New York all the time. It makes me feel good because I realized that I can do the things that my mother thinks I can't. The problem isn't with me, it's because she has a very low opinion of me. It's because of this that I've always resented my mother. It's sacrilegious to even say something like this, but as I grew older I started resenting my mother's existence more and more. As my resentment for her grew, my love for her started to disappear. At one point, my resentment for her turned into hate. The more she prevented me from being independent, the more she tried to tell me how to do simple things like putting up a mosquito net, the more my hate for her grew.

Today, I don't think I hate anyone as much as I hate my own mother. The more time I spend under the same roof with her, the more I want to die. I feel nauseous when she is in the same room with me and I feel like tearing all my hair out when she talks to me. Her voice is probably the most hateful thing in the world for me. When I'm in college, I don't like calling home because I know that I'll have to hear her voice. I'm sure that she thinks she loves me. But she has made me into this insecure, weird, emasculated person that I am today. I had a girlfriend that I loved so much. I never felt like that about anyone before. She was a beautiful human being with a kind soul who loved me as much as I loved her. I wanted to marry her so badly. I wanted to have a life with her. But I knew that if we did get married, my mother would be a part of that life. She would try to control everything that we did, she would probably try to make my girlfriend an obedient daughter-in-law who would always follow her advice in everything she did. My girlfriend would probably resist that and that would make my mother very angry. She would start saying mean things to my girlfriend, she would be rude to her and fight with her all the time and make her life difficult. I would have to choose between my mother and my wife, and what kind of a son would not choose his mother? My mother probably thinks that she would be the nicest and most compromising mother-in-law in the world. But I know my mother. I know her better than anyone else in the world. I think I know her much better than she knows herself. I've lived under her supervision my entire life. I'm her own flesh and blood and she made me want to kill myself for the last 6 years of my life. I can only imagine what she would have done to her. I didn't want to put my girlfriend through that. Any other girl would have left me when my mother would become too difficult. But I know that this girl loved me too much and would willingly suffer through all of that just to make me happy. Not just because she loved me, but because she is the kind of person who can't hurt the people she loves. Knowing all of this, how could I make her go through that fate? I couldn't let her suffer like I do. I had to do it because I was born into this family, but she didn't need to. So I broke up with her. It was probably the hardest thing that I've ever done in my short life. The pain of not being her boyfriend anymore was nothing compared to the pain I felt thinking about what I had done to her. I could imagine her in her room sitting on the floor crying, unable to understand why I'd done that. It was agonising to think about her wondering what she had done wrong for this to happen. She was probably asking herself if she was somehow not enough for me, she was probably thinking that maybe I loved someone else. The more I blooded over this, the more I hated my mother.

A few months later, my mother found out about our break up after she'd called my girlfriend (by mistake, according to her) and she asked me how I could be so cruel. At that moment, I felt an anger within me that I had never felt before. It scared me. I left the house as quickly as I could without arousing her suspicion and went to the roof. I punched a wall to make me feel better and suddenly all the rage that had been pent up inside me came out in short bursts as I punched the wall again and again. At first, I was scared that people would hear me doing it, but then I found out that I didn't care. I kept punching as hard as I could until my knuckles started bleeding. I stopped and stared at my fist. It wasn't too bad, I could hide it until it healed. I could feel the blood which had flooded into my face slowly flowing back.

I'm 21 now and I can feel the hatred I have for my mother affecting my family. They probably don't know what is causing my behaviour, they never cared to understand. All they can think of me is a doll that they play with after coming home from the office. The doll should come have dinner with them when they ask and wear the pretty clothes and shoes that they buy for it. They don't care asking the doll if it wants the things that they buy for it. They think that the doll should be grateful to them for buying it all these pretty expensive things. The doll should make conversation with them when they need it to and entertain them when they want it too. What a bad doll it is for not doing these things when they call for it. But, of course, they love the doll so much! Look at all the sacrifices they make for the doll! All the money that they are spending on the doll, such sacrifices. Of course giving the doll some sort of independence would be asking too much. They feel tense when the doll becomes too independent and out of their control. It's their doll. They want their doll to be safe. That kind of real sacrifice is not something that they are willing to make for their doll. But why is it acting like this? They did everything perfectly didn't they? The doll should be working. It's not their fault. It's just a bad doll.

School was difficult because most people didn't respect me. My mother went with me everywhere. She went to birthday parties, she went to coaching centers, she even went with me to fields if I wanted to play a sport. A lot of my 'friends' didn't like that so they stopped inviting me to their houses, I had to stop playing sports because my parents couldn't accompany me to the park more than once a month and wouldn't let me go alone (when I told them I wanted to play outside, my Dad said, 'Play downstairs, you and your friends had a lot of fun doing that when you were younger,' they expected a 16-year-old to play in the garage downstairs by himself) the kids at coaching centers made fun of me because I was one of 3 boys whose mothers would accompany them to the classes. The other 2 were weirdos. That's when it hit me that I was a weirdo too lol.

So here's the question: You have this amazing life full of luxury and security with a stable, loving family. But you want to die. You want to die every minute that you are alive. You want to die so fucking bad. Every time you're in your dad's car, you hope that there'll be an accident. Coz you don't want it to be you that killed yourself. You know how much pain that would cause your parents. It would destroy them. It would be a pain that no one can express in words and you don't want them to suffer like that. But you also want to die so bad that sometimes you daydream about slamming your head against the bathroom sink. Can anyone really blame you that you want it to be a car accident or something that could take it out of your hands? Right, the question.

So, how long till you jump off that roof?