Burnt out but plodding along

Hey hey, new to this forum (and forums in general)! I'm here mainly because I want to talk to people who can even vaguely understand. Honestly, I think I just want to be able to say what's going on in my life, without needing to censor myself.

I'm in my mid-twenties, and for the last 7 years I've been caring for my identical twin, who struggles with a crop of mental health issues, has a history of self harm and suicidal behaviour, and also has a pretty bad alcohol use disorder. Alcohol problems are really big in our family, and I think this is part of why - no matter how much I bring it up, no matter how obvious the issues are - our parents can't look at the issue directly for more than a few minutes at a time. I have an older sister who has never even talked to my twin about this topic, not even once...so I think they're also just afraid and push it from their minds...so I try to mediate everyone's emotions and expectations while nothing ever changes.

I feel like my sister - wonderful, funny, intelligent - is a precious glass ball, and I always have to be carrying her or something terrible will happen. I wish I could (gently lol, this metaphor is...not great) toss her to someone else, just for a moment sometimes (I want to wake up in the morning without being afraid) but prior experience tells me that they'd just drop her and she'd smash, even though our family loves her and worries so much about her. I can't really talk to my friends about it - either I need to respect her privacy, it's a hell of a downer, or honestly it's so far from what they can understand that they don't take it seriously...and it's hard when you're trying to take the situation seriously, support someone, maintain boundaries, etc. while everyone around you is deliberately ignoring the issue - it makes you feel small, and naive, and alarmist, which is so unfair because they're the ones who honestly have no clue how addiction works. And how selfish it can make people (or, uh, inwardly-directed, that's less harsh). Like, I love my sister, but shit has gotten ugly in the past.

I don't know how to explain it to people...there are more than 40 wine bottles hidden ("hidden", you can't hide 40 wine bottles) in her room, teetering stacks of collapsed goon boxes...and I'm standing at the doorway to her cupboard like "...I just wanted to borrow a jacket" I wake up in the morning to blood all over the floor in the hallway...she can't be trusted with herself when she's drunk; if she's not harming herself she's tripping and hitting her head...things are actually better than they've been in previous years, but I'm still so so scared that I'm going to wake up and go into her room to find her dead. When she's drunk so much you can physically shake her and she won't wake up, I swear I don't even breathe until I'm sure that she is. If it's between 11 pm and 7 am she's drunk or at the very least tipsy, and if something goes wrong in the middle of the night she's worse than useless...I'm the physically disabled twin and somehow she sleeps more than I do...so I live with her and I still really, really miss her sometimes.

I have a chronic illness that is so exhausting in itself, and it's...really hard sometimes. To be honest I've had multiple health professionals tell me that this is negatively affecting my health. I'm their patient, so their solution is for me to choose my own wellbeing over her's, which...I will literally never be able to do haha. We live together just the two of us now, and she's a sweetheart (...except when she's not lol), so she tries to look out for me in return...but lmao God made me one minute older for a reason I guess, because she's my responsibility, not the other way around.

#oversharing???