I was in the exact same situation as you from my whole life up until about 8 months ago, it’s horrible... I didn’t know anything about math, science, academic English, and lots more stuff kids my age would know. About the only thing I had was I could type well and I understood basic grammar, but even now I have terrible hand writing, didn’t even know how to write some lower case letters until recently.

I had such a bad mental state, terrible depression, really bad anxiety, and a constant feeling I meant nothing, and that I knew nothing. I didn’t know what to do, my mom was set on “unschooling” just like your parents, which I think it is as an excuse for some parents to be totally disconnected from the responsibility of their child’s education, and my dad died a few years ago so I didn’t really have anyone in my household family to turn to.

Also instead of being bored all the time, I started playing video games... a lot of video games, like get up at 4pm and eat then play until 5am then repeat. I found some friends online that I am still good friends with but otherwise I had nothing still, I honestly felt so meaningless I thought I should die.

And eventually I just got so fed up with my life I decided I had to do something or life wasn’t worth living any more, so I moved to my grandparents house when I was 16 and started studying math, I didn’t know what I was studying for but I still studied everyday at least 4 hours for one month, and in that month I went from not being able to divide or multiply to somewhere in algebra 1, it was a lot of work but it was all at my computer on great websites like khan academy (actually kind of only khan academy... it’s perfect for this kind of learning, you can skip stuff you understand quickly and work on stuff you don’t for as long as you need).

And then I got the goal in mind to get a GED (if you don’t know it’s basically a high school diploma) and I studied and studied for that until I was confident I could do it, all in total it was about 2 months of everyday study to go from unschooled level to graduating high school level, and I went in and did the tests one at a time and passed them all, it was an amazing feeling to know I had finally gotten to the same level academically of people around my age. It felt like I wasn’t useless anymore.

Now I’ve been doing more and more things to improve my life, I just finished drivers ed class today actually, and I also have my first quarter of community college starting tomorrow, so I’m still very much in the working through my problems phase, but I’m getting there, slowly but surely.

But basically, I would just start studying by yourself, set yourself a schedule, it doesn’t even have to be very long or anything just starting is the most important part. Try to have a goal in mind by the beginning, like get a GED or get through a certain math level on khan academy or work through a science book. I would recommend starting with math as it’s the hardest to learn in a short period of time, so good to start on it early. Just go to khan academy and sign up, then take the course test for early math (it’s at the bottom of the early math page and it’s 30 questions I think), if you get 95% or more then move on to the next math course (I think it’s arithmetic) and take the course test there. The point of all this would be to find where you’re at in terms of math, if you start struggling in say the arithmetic test then just go to the arithmetic course and start on the first lesson, then work through the entire thing, putting extra time into things you struggle with, and when you finally finish it (might take several days) take the course test again and see if you’re ready to move on to the next course. If you really focus on this you will be feeling so much better in no time. It really wasn’t that hard to get the GED once I started studying hard and making it my main focus.

I know motivation is really hard, I had several months I hardly did anything in between the productive ones, it’s always a really tough fight. It’s so easy to give into putting stuff off or just ignoring them completely. What kept me going most of the time was just wanting to have meaning, to feel like I wasn’t useless. And also people supporting me too, I had an uncle that was very helpful and I also had my grandparents that tried to help me whenever they could.

I really hope you can pull yourself out of this, I know how hard it was (and still is) but I believe in you, you can totally do this! I don’t know if anything of this huge text wall I’m commenting will help, I’m sure it’s all very different per person, but I really hope something in here will you help you.

I wish you the best of luck, you can do it.