Undergraduate / "lived to save her and to save myself" - where you come from, UC personal [6]

Feedback please.
I didn't want to show it to any teachers since it seemed too personal. :)
Thank you!

Prompt #1
Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school -
and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

For the last ten years or so when I began to truly recognize the world in which I lived in, I pretty much thought I had a perfectly ordinary life. I was conceived unintentionally, my parents divorced when I became five, and I was raised by my aunt, then my grandmother. It was in seventh grade when I finally came to live with my mother and the new family members: my stepfather and stepbrother. But life as it is seemed fine as always. Adversities, either minor or major, befell in life all the time and to anyone. I knew that the things we possessed without the faintest gratitude for were merely burrowed for a period of time, and that it could be taken away from us at any moment in our lives. It was, without a doubt, rather uncomfortable living with the new family as a daughter of my mother's former spouse, yet I felt grateful for the effusive effort of my stepfather, struggling to treat us as fairly and equally as possible.

But no matter how much I endeavored to grasp until the end the optimistic perspective of life, I was indeed an unfortunate child. Throughout my middle school years, all that I ever imagined of was suicide, and I could not have justified the means of these unpleasant thoughts if I had not read Paulo Coehlo's novel: Veronika Decides to Die. The protagonist, Veronika, simply claims how the most terrifying intention of wanting to kill oneself lies in the sense of vast emptiness. I constantly failed in convincing myself that there was, in fact, what people claimed to be the essence of life, and it was about then that I began to blame my mother. Something had struck me, perhaps an accusation, that it was all because I had been severely traumatized during my childhood years by my own mother: when my aunt would only buy her son the donuts I craved for as well, when I was not able to live with my own family until my second year of middle school, and when my stepbrother, at the age of five, warned me how my stepfather was 'his dad.' But the most critical of all was the sense of alienation I felt amongst my own family, the atmosphere of complete isolation. In a household where it seemed as if there was no position left for myself, I lacked the passion and enthusiasm in setting a goal in the first place, before even considering how I would attain such an objective. If I were to have no one to share my accomplishments with, what significance would those euphoric moments possibly have?

Then, I became seventeen. It was the beginning of this year, 2010, when I actually started to feel the maturity flower inside of me and became aware of the reality in which I was forced to face upon, as my mother told me her story, her life up until now. She started by saying how I was now old enough, mature enough to learn of what lay underneath the veil that had hid the truth. Before then, I knew none of the tears she would shed after her shift as a waitress, that her remarriage was based on the hope of resolving monetary problems, and that she had deemed herself as a sinner since the day she delivered her one and only daughter. I had never been victimized nor alienated by my family all this time; my mother had spoiled her second child to redeem herself from what she had failed to do for me.

Only two things came into my mind as I underwent another trauma, realizing the real sin lay in my ignorance: I would never follow the same path my mother once took and live the life she chose to live, and that I will not be able to rest in peace upon my death unless I free her from the miseries that took her down. From then on, how much I wanted to let go of this world to end my own miserable soul did not matter. It was not about me anymore. I lived to save her and to save myself; after all, living alone in euphory while neglecting the welfare of my own mother just won't do.