OrphanimSenior Contributor
An eternity of family. Shackles of love.
I have always loved my family: My brothers, my dad, but most especially my mother. As a child I would have seperation anxiety nightmares of watching helplessly while the people I love move on without me, waving to me. These images still haunt me to this day, I reacted to them so strongly.
We all have our flaws, and I have naturally had times where even the people I love most have tormented or upset me, whether they mean to or not. As the years have passed and I have grown to become a more highly functioning individual, my family has changed as much as I have. My eldest brother has left to live with his beloved. My father and mother have separated. My middle brother, autistic and psychotic, is both someone I love and whom I despise. I, the youngest sibling, have kind of just been along for the ride, struggling to find my own place and identity.
My middle brother is both the storm and its eye, the thing that has torn my family to shreds and yet kept it united. He is a lovable burden. During puberty he became violently psychotic, frequently attacking my father, my eldest brother, and even threatening the life of myself and my mother; the most important person in my life. The childish temperament of autism combined with teenage angst and psychosis created a miserable, angry figure in my life who I came to hate with a passion. I hated what he did to my family, justifying himself with snarky, poorly thought out responses and countless, non-existant characters that poisoned his mind and reasoning.
Myself and my mother clung to one another for support as she and my mother seperated, but I found myself sinking as she too succamb to a stress-induced psychosis. The person I loved most in my life became intolerable. I left home and practically abandoned the studies she wanted so badly for me to succeed at to find refuge with my father. Living in the mountains, I descended into a state of chronic depression, spending roughly five years miserable, self-hating and achieving nothing.
In my absence, with the help of other family, my mother recovered, and my middle brother too. He finally has medication which has stifled the worst of his psychosis and rendered him mostly calm and pleasant, if at times melancholy. In his mid twenties, he still bears that insufferable teen angst, and his repertoire of unlikable personalities continues to accumulate. I don't understand how or why he clings onto such foul characters, but I suppose each of them reflect his childishness and surliness and they serve to protect his psyche in some alien way. I now live with my mother and middle brother again.
Life is tolerable now. I am no longer so horribly depressed that I scream with agony from repressed trauma and pain, but I am melancholic and despondent. I am not confident and lack the motivation to pursue my dreams and the things I love to do, such as artwork. I waste away my hours, putting on weight and stare forlornly out at the blue sky as it fades to orange. Again and again.
Do you know what it's like to be twenty-two and to suffer from back pains? My corpulence is destroying my back. When I lay in bed, on my stomach, the weight of my stomach pains my spine, and I need a cushion directly beneath my belly to alleviate it. A life-time of escapism using computers that continues to this day leaves me mortified of damaging my eye-sight; I try and keep track of the floaters in my vision, but it's hard.
People tell me not to dwell on my present and hope for my future, but I am doomed to inherit my brother with his impossible needs and hopeless existance. I love my brother, I love my mother, I love my whole family dearly, but I feel as if I am bound to them forever, and have no hope of striking out on my own and being alone. Alone, but not lonely.
I will stop here. I have written a lot. I doubt many will read all of this; I just needed to vent.
If YOU are reading this, please know that I do not wish to speak of anything in person. I merely need to vent now and then, just as any of us do.
