i (19f) posted about this on another subreddit yesterday and people gave me so much useful advice but oh my freaking gosh i feel like i’m doing something so wrong, so i need advice!
basically the situation i’m in is that i’ve been saving for university tuition since high school and my parents take basically everything left after my tuition is paid out of my account (it’s a shared account i made with them when i was younger). i have to take out student loans sometimes too, because they take so much of my paycheque. the thing is, they promised me that they’ll repay me. i really love and trust my parents but i want them to just keep the money at this point. during high school they literally told me that i don’t have to even work, but i didn’t want to go into too much debt for university, so i chose to work! if they told me they needed the money, i would’ve worked more! i thought the whole time that i was saving for tuition, but i told them that i’m just working “for fun” and “for the experience” because they wouldn’t understand why i don’t want debt. i understand that debt is okay sometimes, but why do i need it when i already saved up in high school… they never even directly asked me if i wanted to use my saved-up money for tuition, they just expected me to follow their plan.
i’m so non-confrontational i literally don’t want the money back. they can keep it, as if it was rent, even tho it’s not actual “rent” but they just take it out of my account. it’s like 20k. my parents are so loving except they also don’t really give me any freedom, so whenever i hide things from them, i feel so so so guilty and it eats me up. also they worry way too much about me! that’s also why i don’t want to tell them about my job, maybe they’re going to feel guilty and pay me back… but that would feel even worse.
i need to make a new bank account and get a secret part-time job i work during university.
i know i’m not doing anything wrong about hiding my job, since it’s literally going to mostly only go towards my tuition, the reason i’m not even telling them about the job is so that i can save them from worrying unnecessarily about me (since they worry about literally anything that comes to me), and i’m actually offering them to keep the 20k of money, even though they themselves told me they’d pay me back. i even offered to take time off after high school to work for some years to pay them rent, and they said no! that they want me to go to school and to focus on school! in fact, i didn’t even have a choice, i had to go straight to school.
fuck i actually hate hiding things but i cannot tell them. they just won’t understand. i’m not even doing this out of maliciousness but i just have no other choice. they can literally keep all that money omg. BUT WHY DO I KEEP FEELING BAD?!?!!!?!?!!?! can someone help guide me on what i should do?
also is it okay for me to stop worrying about the rent part now? i think 20k is enough rent i gave them to last for the entire course of my degree, since they already took that all. i don’t want to pay them any more, but they can keep everything they took already. even if they offer to pay it back, i don’t want it. i genuinely don’t, because i already felt guilty about not paying rent, so i’ll consider this to be my rent.
i just don’t want to feel guilty anymore i fucking hate this feeling of hiding things. fucking hate it so much. every angle there’s absolutely no way that this can be seen as me taking advantage of them or hiding things out of maliciousness. yet i can’t stop feeling bad. fuck. my head is spinning because i genuinely can’t find anything i’m doing wrong but i somehow just feel bad?
tl;dr my parents take most of my paycheque away and want me to be okay with debt. they promise to repay me, though. i saved in high school not knowing they’d expect me to pay them rent later on, so i only did only enough to save for my tuition. i’m okay with debt, but i don’t need it because i was planning on using my saved-up money from high school for my tuition. i offered to even pay rent by taking a few years off school, and they told me not to. now, i’m not going to ask for the 20k they took from me back, but i want to get a secret job and not tell them about it, yet can’t stop feeling guilty that i’m not telling them about it? should i get a secret job and not tell them about it in this situation?