My brother is crying in his bedroom.
My younger brother is diagnosed with Bipolar 1 and Autism and he's just now becoming an adult. We've lived together for five or six years now? Something like that. I took him in after a severe episode left him unable to continue living at our parents house. At the time we didn't know what was going on.
He's completely mentally tormented. He can hardly leave the house.
I tried helping him get a part time job but he ended up threatening to kill himself to his manager and walked out, his manager called the cops out of fear for his safety and he ended up in the emergency room. I tried helping him enroll in two classes at the local community college, he made it a week before he had a mental breakdown and ran out of school crying. At which point we unenrolled him.
He has no friends at all, and I can't get him to visit family with me anymore, and I can't get him to go out just the two of us. I brought him on a beach vacation with my father and sister (both unrelated to him) and he spent the entire week crying in the shower. I try to bring him on local nature trails, I try bringing him swimming. But he won't. So he stays inside always.
But he's miserable. He isn't somebody that enjoys being inside alone all of the time. He's hard to be around, always on edge, always crying, always upset and often having emotional outbursts.
He has a therapist. He has a psychiatrist. And he's on medications. We're going through the long process of trying to get the medication right but obviously, we're not there yet. But we're working on it.
When I first took this on we didn't know about his mental conditions. I knew he was troubled and struggling. But I had been troubled and struggling too. We don't come from a good family. I saw myself in him and thought that if I gave him what I thought I had needed, that he'd be able to grow and thrive. But I think I was wrong.
I've given the last five years of my life to this. I'm only 30. I have no friends and no life and not because I can't have either, but because of how much extensive care and attention my brother needs, and because I've decided to neglect myself in the pursuit of helping him get better. It's a compulsion, really. Every time I do something on my own I feel the weight of his need clawing at the back of my mind, screaming that he can't be alone. And so I find it hard to live.
And I'm home with him. But I feel like a battered spouse. I hear him come out of his room and my heart drops. I'm scared of him. My nervous system is shot. I feel like I can't breath, like every step and every word needs to be carefully calculated or else he might plunge into some sort of depressive self loathing and I might have to deal with it. I'm just exhausted.
I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm not helping, like we're not making progress. And he has nowhere else to go. But I'm so sad and tired and hurt and I don't want to live like this.