 tl;dr time away from toxic relationships has allowed me to do introspection into my upbringing and why i like to be in toxic relationships in the first place, and now i know that i use them as a way of avoiding my own needs and desires. does anyone have experience in finding what you want to do with your life after conditioning yourself to not take up space?

tw: sexual assault, suicide, substance abuse, self-harm mentions but no details

i'm currently doing study abroad in the country my dad's family is from. he tries to get as far away from them as he can, so i'm meeting them for the first time and learning a lot of things about grandma wang. my dad is the product of her time doing sex work to feed herself. after everything she dealt with it by trying to kill herself and by seeking validation for her body from her boyfriends; grandpa would just leave her be, until it was bad, and then he brought her to get electro-shock therapy. she lost the fetus she was carrying. my dad has no emotional affect when he is around my mom or her family members, but sometimes he takes me to hang out with his friends and he seems to be experiencing some kind of happiness. when i'm doing badly, though, he does nothing; even during times when i was reported to school for my suicidal behavior and threatened to be hospitalized, my dad only told me that i just needed to do whatever i needed to in order to avoid hospitalization.

grandma on my moms side was raped by her bio dad maybe on the daily until my grandpa "rescued her" and she dealt with the trauma by drinking and verbally abusing / hitting grandpa and her kids; grandpa would just let it happen, and while they were kids, my moms sister would just take it, my mom would always have a job so she would already be home as little as possible. i think that my mom strongly internalized grandma's feelings that the femininity = abuse, whether it be on the giving or receiving end, so she made working / that male gender role super essential to her identity. before and a little after she got married to my dad, though, they lived with my grandma wang (cultural thing, but also weird for my mom since she's white) and she told my mom that she MUST stay home and raise me because ONLY a man can work. my mom has to obey grandma wang and i think this cultivated resentment in my mom towards me, especially when i was growing into a feminine body because it was a manifestation of her own limiting femininity; she was always putting me on diets despite the fact that i was already severely underweight, would always want me to wear clothes 3 - 4 sizes too large, had no problems about my visible self-harm marks until the school came after me for it, told me things like "you can't just sleep with every boy you are friends with" whenever i would hang out around boys despite my TOTAL LACK OF INTEREST in sex. it was to the point that i cried when she tried to teach me what sex was when i was in late middle school - to this day i have never received any formal sex ed.

my mom constantly berated me for my body, and later my behaviors, would tear apart any career path i talked to her about being interested in; she said that she wouldn't help me pay for college even though it was within my family's means because 'sending me to college' would be a waste of her money despite my perfect grades. i felt like she hated me a lot, which probably still holds, but i think it's also that her vision of success for me at that time was that i would get into a monogamous heterosexual marriage and fulfill the role of a house wife. i got fed up with it; thought about dropping out of high school to do sex work because that was the narrative about my life that i heard the most frequently, from her and people at my school, but decided to go to community college for a year and primary sleep at friends' houses (most of these friends i was in codependent/BPD relationships with, but it seemed better at the time than having to be around my parents and anyway it was great to have sex w people just so i would know that someone doesn't view my body as evil). finally i moved out and went to a university.

in the three years since i have fully moved out of their house, i have come out to her as bisexual/gay, experienced sexual assault, and made several suicide attempts. in the past eight? six? months or so my mom has suddenly become very supportive, and i'm not sure if it was a result of my most recent suicide attempt, both of us maturing, or her realization that i was actively planning to cut her out of my life after i ceased to be financially dependent on her. she doesn't tell me that my body is too this or that and she makes an active effort to assist me in making a career for myself. nonetheless i keep it low contact because i have no idea if / when our relationship will revert to the way it was

so i've figured out how to semi-manage my relationship with my mom, but i think that i just replaced it w codependent romantic relationships to avoid having to think about myself as an individual person. i had a particularly bad run this last time so i've been single for 6 months and it is just now hitting me that i've spent so much time figuring out how to make myself small enough to avoid abuse from mom &amp; romantic partners that i don't want anything for myself anymore. i've definitely made significant process; i don't feel like my body is evil and i'm actually doing a pretty OK job at taking care of it, and i'm doing a pretty good job at managing the emotions i feel in irl friendships (long-distance with friends from university is sort of hard rn. too much of everyone projecting into everyone else). but, now that i'm acting more normal people keep asking me what my plans are for my life. i always want to say "i have no fucking clue! the most i can do is to try not to die!" i feel like if i focus on myself for long enough i'll eventually find that there's something there that \~makes me me\~ or some shit and i'll be able to answer that question but at other times it feels like i just have no future and it isn't worth it to be healthy