I'm sorry your mom was taken from you before you could have had more of the sharing you needed. Despite the problems, it sounds like you had a strong bond of love. As you seem to know, yourself, your grief over losing your mom is intertwined with other sorrows that are weighing you down. You need something meaningful to do. Whatever you might pick probably won't feel meaningful in the beginning. You have to invest the time to let it become meaningful. If you're basically home thinking all the time, you will be perpetually in grief. Enough thinking. Time for doing. Something has to be going on in your life in the present, or you will spend day after day wandering the hallways in your mind wishing you could open doors into the past that are closed.

It is tragic to be only 23 when losing a mother. Nothing remotely that bad happened to me at that age, so I won't say I know what you've been through. But people survive tragedy. I am utterly amazed at the human capacity to surmount tragedy. Were it me, maybe I would be destroyed. I don't know why some people come through tragedy to find joy and meaning in life, while others can't seem to recover. Maybe, for some, the loss gets counterbalanced by some good fortune that carries them through - some network of support they can tap into. You don't seem to have that. Depression tells us that we are doomed to never have that. We can make that a self-fulfilling prophecy by not venturing beyond our walls. I'm depressed myself, so I know how that illness tends to perpetuate itself.

You sound more than a bit down on yourself, the way you talk about choices and baggage. It sounds like you blame yourself for a lot. Taking responsibility is great, but you might be over-doing it. Whatever you've been through can deepen your humanity and what you have to offer others by way of understanding. I think 38 is still quite young. Don't resign yourself to unhappiness. Allow for the unexpected to happen. Sooner or later it does. It's not always something bad.