I am so exhausted.

I am so tired of fighting dissociation each day.

I am so tired of fighting bouts of depression that come and go at monthly intervals.

I am so ready to give up.

My brother, who was my abuser, was recently in a terrible car accident labor day weekend... back in September. I felt so guilty for this because I had wished for it... and things much worse. My brother ended up having extensive injuries; two head injuries (brain bleed and a severe cut on the back of his head which required a large amount of staples), a tear in his urethra, a few tears in his bowels (mostly large intestine), two crushing fractures on his pelvic bone on the (left and center side), lacerations along his spine, collapsed lung, and a great deal of internal bleeding.

In total, he ended up being in the CCU for a week, the ICU for two months, and from there a regular room for about a week before being discharged into a rehabilitation center which he stayed at for about two weeks. Basically what I'm trying to say is that he had a lot of trauma and he will take a lot of time to heal, he'll have about six months of physical therapy, and will probably need another surgery at that time, and then more physical therapy to recover before he will be able to walk again.

I felt so guilty about how I felt about his accident that I spent a lot of time with him at that hospital to make sure that he was okay and to try to help in any way that I could. I really don't like to see anyone hurt, and nobody deserves to be in the amount of pain that he is in. Recently he was discharged from the rehabilitation center, which is a good thing, because it means that he is recovering, but a bad thing because it means that he is currently living with my parents.

I'm a college student and I live on campus about two hours away. Winter break is coming up which means that I will probably be home for the better part of a month, maybe more. I have no reason to be afraid to go home, he couldn't try anything because he is so disabled right now, and even if that isn't an issue because he still has a catheter because he is still having issues with his urethra and isn't able to use the bathroom without it. I still have this huge sense of impending doom which I don't understand. I have so many emotions about this that I don't really know how to explain the way I feel.

I feel guilty about the accident, and it a warped way I feel like it was my fault because I prayed to God so hard that something like this would happen, that he wouldn't be able to use his stuff ever again.

I also feel relieved because I know that I'll be home to help my parents out with my brother, because he really does need a lot of help in order to do normal things like get in his wheel chair or help get food to eat.

I feel angry because my parents know what happened in the past and never asked me if I would be okay with him staying in the house. I know its not my house and I would have been okay with him there because he has no where else to go, but it would have still be nice to have been asked if it was okay for him to live at home again.

I feel sad because I'm not excited to come home because I know living at home with him will be an emotional thing for me.

I feel exhausted because I have 6 days before I am done with finals and my mom has called me several times within the last few days to ask when I'm coming home, or to ask me to come home to help with things because she really needs help taking care of my brother and I can't tell her no, so I drive home two hours to help, and come back during the day to do school stuff.

I feel alone because I feel like I have nobody to talk to about how I feel. I would feel guilty talking to my parents about all of this because they really need help, and there isn't a lot of family nearby to help out.

I feel like a roller coaster of emotions and I feel like its making a lot of my pstd problems worse, like my dissociation, anxiety, and depression. I've tried to talk to my boyfriend about this, because he is one of the few people I can talk to about this subject and I feel as if I am wearing him out emotionally because he doesn't know how to help me other than to suggest I come home with him for the holidays, and I don't want to put him or his family out of the way, especially when my parents need me at home (plus his parents know how badly my brother was injured and wouldn't understand why I wouldn't want to be there because they don't know about my past abuse). So I want my boyfriend to have a break from me, I don't want to put his parents out, and I want to help put less strain on my mom who has been taking care of my brother since he has come home from the hospital.

I really don't know what to do. I really just want to give up. I wish I could just put all of this behind me and its frustrating to me that I can't get past all of these emotions. I knew that my brother would be home for Christmas after his accident and so I really tried to step up a lot of therapy techniques to help me get past some of my emotions. I went and talked to my school counselor several times, read a lot of books to help me move on as well as do a lot of therapeutic exercises (Courage to Heal and a book on PTSD). I've tried to utilize a lot of places like this on the internet to help me sort through my emotions when counseling wasn't available to me. I don't know if its just that I'm trying way to hard, or if I'm just tired of working so hard on emotions, or because I'm working so hard a lot more of my emotions are on the surface that I'm usually better at hiding. I'm just really agitated that I can't control my emotions and that I can't let everything go and forgive. I really just feel so alone.

Has anyone else been in a situation like this?