Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 08:34:17 -0400
Subject: I am a teen who is having trouble in almost every aspect of my life.

First, I would like to say sorry that the text is just a giant wall,
but I have had this kept up inside me for a long time.

I am only 14 years old and just started my 9th grade year of high
school. I have had all my feelings bottled up for several years, but
this last week is too much for me. I was sick last week, my dog died,
and my dad had to go to a whole different continent for ten days.

My
mom does some things that hurt me. She holds things over my head. For
example, the school I am going to is a TERRIBLE school. The staff is
very incompetent, and don't seem to care about the students at all. I
was put into an agriscience class, after a switch from another class,
when I wanted culinary.

I have wanted to become a chef for two years
now, but that one class switch was enough to destroy part of my career
wish. They didn't give me a say in anything.

But anyway, my new want
is to go to virtual school next year instead of having to go to that
so-called school again. My mom talked to my great-grandmother (for
some reason) about it, and after seeing me on various social networks
like Instagram and YouTube, shows that I do have friends outside of
school, so I won't turn into a hermit if I DO do homeschooling. She
said she'll try my best to get me into homeschooling next year, but
that's a big thing she's holding over my head.

Whenever I make her mad
(I am sorry that I make her mad, but sometimes it doesn't do good
having all these bottled-up feelings and having to take even more of
it), she threatens not to let me do homeschooling.

My dad still needs
convincing about me going to homeschool, because I'm a teenager, and
in his eyes, teens screw everything up and hate doing their work. He
thinks that I won't do any of my work and fail everything in every
aspect of the school, and this hurts me. He never directly tells me
about this, but I know that he thinks that.

She threatens not to tell
him and to force me to suck it up and go through more years of that
place of disarray whenever I make her mad. I am seriously frightful
about next year. I don't want to go back to that place tomorrow, and
it's only the third week of the year...

My mother also constantly takes away the Internet and my photography
hobbies whenever I get in trouble. My iPod is a great treasure to me,
mainly because of its great camera and the Internet. I can do all my
homework and talk with people all the way across the world, just with
the Internet and my little device. However, she always sees my iPod as
another punishment target.

The camera is the most-used part of my
iPod, because taking photos of clouds is my hobby. I enjoy uploading
these pictures to Instagram. However, all that connection is taken
away when she takes my iPod away, which is quite frequent.

If I have
something to do that needs the Internet, like homework, and I go to
the computer to use that, she immediately takes that away too.

The
computer and the iPod are my only means of Internet access, so I'm
screwed if I have homework to do and the Internet is taken from me.

My mom also wants me to excel above all the other people around me
(although I do joke to myself that at school, I can do that by just
standing somewhere doing nothing), so she forces me to do
extracurricular activities. I had a tiny wish to do robotics in my
high school, but they didn't have it as an elective, only a club, so I
mainly focused on culinary (which I didn't get anyway, making me feel
worse whenever I walk into the agriscience class every day).

However,
she looked up the robotics club, a secret I'd been trying to keep from
her for a while because I HATE doing extracurricular activities at
school because I dislike socializing with people in general,
face-to-face. I have a couple close friends, but that's about it.

Now,
I HAVE to do an extracurricular activity for this school year, and I
really don't want to. It's already bad enough with that agriscience
class, full of rowdy people who even drove the teacher to her breaking
point two days ago (she just went "I'm done, I can't teach anymore,"
and shut off our lesson).

There's not really any activity I want to
join, but I'm stuck with only a couple days left to decide.
I also feel as though all my areas of privacy are invaded by both
parents. I understand that they need to monitor what their children
are doing on social networks (which 75% of parents today probably
aren't), but it's too much for me.

My parents constantly spy on me
while I'm on my iPod or computer, and confront me if they see
something that looks even remotely suspicious. My dad has an Instagram
account to see what my brother and I are doing, which isn't bad at
all.

However, he feels like he isn't diving deep enough into his
parental duties, so at some points he tricks me into giving it to him
to "look at." The first day with my new, awesome iPod, he said, "Can I
look at it?" so I have it to him, not thinking anything would happen.
When I came over, I saw him looking through all my followers' pictures
and all my apps.

Another point, my mom was "cleaning my room" while I
was at school. I keep many journals and write strange stories (my most
recurring character is "June," a four-year-old hedgehog genius that
makes inventions and hacking programs). I hate sharing my work with my
family. I don't know why, I just don't like it. It's even hard for me
to tell them how I do at schoolwork. So, my mom looks through all my
journals and reads everything. A week later, my brother tells me that
she did so. She never told me anything about this.

She also goes
through my email and questions me on certain accounts I made, like I
got an account for a file-sharing site called 4shared that I could
download files called IPS patches from there. (An IPS patch is a hack
of a game made into a patch you can apply to a rom of a game.) I had
no idea she even went through my emails.

Thanks very much for reading. Is there anything I could do?

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