When I (F22) was in high school, my older brother (now M26) had an addiction-driven mental health crisis. This resulted in him moving back home. He became very emotionally volatile, aggressive, and angry, and my parents had to stop the state court from pressing charges for the false imprisonment and threatening with a deadly weapon of a minor (me). We also found out he had restraining orders against him by women in other states.
Since then, he’s lived at home. Going home became awful. Staying at school was my only solace but I also hated myself for not sticking it out with him. He’d always been mean, I was bullied in high school and he was most often the ring leader encouraging it. But this was something else entirely. He’s clinically paranoid, so he sees the worst in everyone, ESPECIALLY women and minorities (I am expressly avoiding stating exactly what he struggles with because I do not want to stigmatize mental health issues in any way). He’s become a bigot by all standards. The earliest example I can think of was he was convinced that my best friend in high school was faking being gay to get with me and then he screamed me into a corner because I was “a sadistic attention whore for not taking that guy to prom”. I very quickly learned that I could not bring friends home because he would find some way that they were deceiving me and that I was a monster or somehow subhuman for it.
I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, so I kept it to myself. Only my closest friend knew that something was kind of wrong at home, but I never elaborated. I’m still endlessly grateful that she let me come to her house after school so often with no questions asked.
The only people I could talk to were people online where I had a bit of anonymity and therefore didn’t feel like I was breaking any rules.
Years later I went to college. My mom, by her own admission, resents me for being able to leave. I had a lot of trauma from many things he had done, so I asked if she could not text me super disturbing information about him when I was in class as I found it incredibly triggering and distracting. That doubled her sense of abandonment over the whole situation. College was the first place other than online where I talked about it freely. First I told my then partner, then I started opening up to friends and found it very freeing. That allowed me to finally feel what I realized was grief for the brother I once knew in childhood.
I think that my ability to process it verbally and the newfound separation of my social life from my family allowed me to be less resentful of him when I’d visit during breaks from college. A while later I’d gotten on antidepressants as well, and my being shut off emotionally made him less reactive because there were fewer changes in my voice for him to read into. He started confiding in me about all his delusions and I’d listen and tell him what he wanted to hear. I was still terrified, because he would only talk to me in my room with the door closed, and he’d sit against the door so I couldn’t leave. But my parents were happy he was talking to someone and I was glad he wasn’t taking it out on them anymore for a short while. I remember telling my boyfriend that it’s almost like we were normal siblings like I always wanted.
During one break he started asking if we could play a video game I liked so I taught him to play. After I left for college again I said we could call and play weekly if he wanted to, and so we did. I also let him know I had a new instagram so that he could send me memes and vent if he wanted to. He thanked me for being there for him, and with some distance between us I started feeling a bit more secure about talking to him casually.
In retrospect I can see a lot of red flag behaviors that I chose to ignore. He started sending me very strange nsfw memes (sparsely enough to just chalk up to a strange sense of humour though) but he’d get angry if I didn’t react as he wanted me to. He’d tell me I was broken for not “hearting” the meme. When we’d play our video game he’d fixate on the fact that my character was male and say he hoped I wasn’t gay. He’d say he liked when I wore a skirt for the first time on a trip back home for the summer because “growing up you never dressed to look good.” He also fixated a lot on the fact that I had tattoos and wanted to know if there were any in places he couldn’t see. I shut all of these sorts of things down. I lied about my tattoos and their placements to make him lose interest, I wore more masculine clothes when I’d visit, I stopped wearing makeup in his vicinity, and I staunchly avoided any suggestive talk in every possible way.
Writing it all in once place makes me wonder why I didn’t see it coming but I think I just assumed that I could handle a bit of discomfort in the interest of giving him someone to talk to.
Then he started having me keep secrets for him. He told me he was using again, but I knew that if I told my parents that he wouldn’t ever talk to me or anyone else again. I also knew that changes in his behavior would tip them off to it, so it wasn’t in anyone’s interest for me to snitch. He also told me some of the things he had done for money before. Part of me wonders if he was telling me secrets to test what he could get away with and what I’d stay quiet about, like he was prepping me. Still, I will never tell anyone what he said. If it is true, then he deserves to keep those secrets for as long as he sees fit.
Then one night while I was at college he texted and asked to address “the elephant in the room”. I didn’t know what he meant. He admitted that he was incredibly attracted to me. I thought I was misunderstanding but he very clearly, with no room for interpretation, stated exactly what he thought about me. He even went so far as to say I should have expected it and that I was “practically asking for it”.
I immediately told my parents, sent all the evidence, and blocked him on everything. He made multiple burner accounts to send me messages telling me I was a snitch and a whore for the following week.
Only a handful of people close to me know about this. I don’t go home anymore, I refuse to share space with him because I am afraid. My parents don’t like to discuss it, when my mom brings it up she refers to it as him “hurting my feelings”. My grandma told me I should have taken it as a compliment, when I didn’t respond well to that she decided to never speak of it again. My mom told me he was upset that I didn’t wish him a happy birthday once, but as far as I’ve been told he pretends that I don’t exist anymore. He doesn’t seem to question why or how I’ve never been back home since then, which is fine with me. My mom has had me come home before under the guise that he’s in a hospital, but I found out very quickly that that was a lie and so trust has broken there too. She resents me even more for that.
I’ve taken ages to recover from the pain, guilt, anxiety, and disgust he’s inflicted upon me. For a long time I couldn’t look at myself without being sick to my stomach because that is the face that attracted its own brother. That is the body that did so. Those are the clothes, that’s the makeup, that’s the hair, and that is the kindness that he said was to blame. I was certain my boyfriend would leave me when I told him because all I could see when I looked at myself was ugly and tainted by the knowledge that my brother had seen me in such a way. I felt dirty, and typing this out I realize that on some level I still do. I feel like when I tell people all this that they see me as tainted in the same way.
I wonder every day if he knows what he did and how it has affected me, but I very much doubt it. I know I should not blame myself, but I also wonder if this could have been avoided if I had just done something differently. Something about the “elephant in the room” comment makes me think he truly thought I knew and that I was playing into it somehow, and that makes me even sicker.
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