I booked my flight for 360|iDev Min. I know if you read my last blog post you’d be under the impression that I had an epic road trip planned. I did. I don’t get to go on it.

Once again, I was pressured by my family to not drive my car. I was told it was too long. I was told my car was not reliable. I was told that it wouldn’t be cost effective.

If it were just this one incident, that would be fine. I found a reasonable flight and the impulse was probably a stupid one anyway. I am just annoyed that I am constantly being pressured to do things I don’t want to do by people who bear no consequences of the decision.

When I decided to go back to school for programming, my father was adamantly against it. He had a bad experience with a computer science class twenty-five years ago, so he hates programming. He pressured me very strongly to go to law school. He told me that I would never find a programming job and that I would suck at it.

My programming degree was a hundred bucks a credit. A law degree sets you back six figures. I paid for my programming degree. If I had caved to pressure from my dad, I would be six figures in debt and probably wouldn’t have a job. Or if I did, I would barely make enough to cover the student loan payments.

Why do people feel like they need to impose their world view on me? If I had done what my father wanted and fallen on my face, he wouldn’t bear any of the consequences of that action. I would. I would be the one holding the bag for the debt. I would be the one who wasted three years of my life that I could have spent doing something else.

Now that I am beginning to see my labors bear fruit he is more than happy to take credit for my success even though he fought me every step of the way.

Back in 2008 I realized that I had to take control of my life. I let my parents and other people talk me into doing things because it was easier to just go along with what other people wanted than it was to not only fight them for the right to do what I wanted, but to also then have to accomplish it on my own. After limping along like that for nearly a decade of my adult life, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore.

I am so tired of fighting my parents and my husband to be able to do the things I know I need to do. I despair that this is ever going to end. I am sick of being treated like a child who is somehow incapable of knowing what I want or how my world works. There is more than one way to live your life and just because I want to live my life differently doesn’t mean my way is wrong. I don’t think I will ever get to a point where I will be treated with respect or have any of my accomplishments acknowledged by my family. But you know what, that’s okay. I am not doing this for them. I am doing it for me. If I was doing this for them, I would be an underemployed lawyer right now instead of a moderately successful software engineer.