Might as well jump right in:

I've wanted nothing more than freedom from my mother's involvement for years. Yet she never leaves me alone: when I was at college she called me almost daily, keeping me for 20-45 minutes each time. As I first became depressed the first person I cut off was her, and she actually sent the campus police to tell me to call her and let her know I'm okay, and yes, I resented that.

I came home and got shunted off to another school, which was a terrible fit and I ended up leaving and living at home again for two hellish years. My mother and I were just on the phone now talking about those years, and it seems I can't talk to her without devolving into a screaming maniac. Here's more or less what happened:

I had little interest in studying in college - I have/had no direction or strong interest, and little ability to actually work. All it provided for me, though, was a chance to have a life of my own. Mostly, I was involved online (for the two years I lived at home, all I really did was sleep, eat, read, and spend hours online. My mother constantly called me an addict and threatened to send me to rehab for internet addicts, and my laptop - oh sorry, her laptop - was kept locked in a safe for weeks on end, wherein I would just go and spend all day at the public library), and while it actually kind of fueled my dysfunction, it was also incredibly liberating. I felt for the first time like I was part of something, like I had a life and a self, and when that was taken away there was a profound feeling of disconnect from everything.

For two years I was barely left alone - or at least that's what it felt like. Honestly, I feel so pathetic, so juvenile whining about this, getting so upset over a parents nagging, but it felt like torture to constantly interrupted while thinking or reading, the more it happened the more disproportionate my rage gets. My mother would come into my room and talk at me so often I actually started to become paranoid, hearing her screaming for me when she wasn't even in the house, or was but hadn't said anything. I brought that up to her today and her response was "That's what parents do when their adult children live at home and don't do anything - nag them and bother them until they get a job and get out of the house." Yet to me, it felt a bit like those mental handicaps in Harrison Bergeron, where a sound plays every few seconds to scatter a person's thoughts so they never think too deeply. Like it was just making everything worse and making me want to retreat further

I have no justification. I'm a vile, selfish, childish piece of nothing. But living like that killed me. All I wanted was to be alone with my online life. I did try, feebly, to get a job, but got rejected from everywhere (which is still going on now and, when my mom tells me "All you had to do was get a job and I would have left you alone" ) Because of my status as an unemployed dropout who couldn't pay rent to live at home, it turns out, I never had any right to privacy or solitude. It would have been nice if I knew that, I would have opted for homelessness.

There's another part: my mother says I was the one horrible to her. That all I did was swear at her and call her names, that I made a mess of the house then demanded my dinner - which isn't true. At the very least, I never asked for food, if anything I preferred to prepare my own and eat alone. I spent most of the time in my room, and trying to barricade myself in was treated as a horrific offense (she threatened to take the door off the hinges multiple times). My mother says if I was left alone in a kitchen it would look like a toddler tried to make dinner for 10 people - meaning there would be a couple of dishes in the sink. She goes on about how I demanded to have my clothes washed or otherwise wore filthy clothes - because I wasn't allowed to use the washer and dryer, she claimed I was too stupid to handle it and would break it, though once I was so desperate after not having clean anything for a month that I did take my clothes and ran a cold wash. It went perfectly fine.

I could go on. We have claims against each other, and I've even wondered about getting someone to help sort it out legally, who's in the right or wrong. My mom always claims that her side will completely negate mine, that when she explains what I did I'll be in jail (the only thing I can think of there is money. I did steal money. She knows and I intend to pay it back, I've already started. That was the worst of what I did and I knew it), for things like bringing vermin into the house (we found a mouse shortly before I left). The more I look, the more I realize how invalid my suffering is. It all boils down to "I was upset and in a bad way mentally." Which no one cares about. Now I'm thinking, what if I'm actually an abusive deadbeat who ruined someone's life and really am responsible for her drinking problem and mental breakdown? What's all this victimization I feel? Narcissism? Insanity? When I was talking/yelling this afternoon and tried to explain what I experienced, she said I was making up fantasies of how things were.

I'm inclined to think part of this rage comes from how we've basically spent our lives together. Neither of us had any friends in our area, we were together 24/7 while I was growing up. And all I wanted was to have a life of my own where I didn't have to keep everything hidden lest it incur criticism or be used as ammo against me when I wasn't performing to expectation (when my mom found out about a bunch of internet friends I hung out with, she threatened to hunt them down and kill them because they were distracting me from my studies. I just recall this and think "Your kid makes friends for the first time, and you want to kill them. That's healthy"). I could be fully real online, express whatever I wanted and someone would be there to join in or commiserate instead of brushing it off. It was freedom that I'd never know offline where my mother seems to be around me constantly, even when there's physical distance there are still phone calls and full inboxes. Hell, she called me at work recently because I hadn't spoken to her for a glorious 4 days and she "didn't know if [I] was alive or dead".

As usual, I don't know where I'm going with this, other than I'm worried and disturbed.