Looks like Elvis has left the building....er...thread I mean...
Elvis, if you do read this, no one here can really tell you whether or not you are being used by your instructor...you are going to make the call on that one, bud. The previous page of comments in this thread have given you lots of advice. I personally would start with an hour with another instructor, perhaps even the CFI , just to get some feedback and judgement from a different set of eyes.
I had close to 4000 instruction hours with hundreds of students before I found my way into the a big iron job years ago. And during those days, I soloed students with as little as 14 hours (flew an hour every day...non-stop), and as much as 60 hours (2+ years to finish a PPL). Then there were the few I could never let solo at all.
But I can tell you this for sure, if any of my 18 hour students took a 5 month sabbatical between lessons and showed up one day expecting to fly off on his own soon, he certainly wasn't going to do it too soon under my tutelage.