As I’ve said a few times on here, I live with my NParents because I'm in a drug treatment program, am disabled but have yet to receive disability, and several other reasons I don't care to get into right now. I spent the first 18 months after moving back, sleeping on the floor in a pile of blankets, because I was sharing the room with a bunch of storage they had put in there. There was no room for a bed and even if there was, I doubt they would have let me move one in.

My younger brother, a well adjusted human being who never once got anywhere near the treatment I did from them, (something I don't resent him for and am happy to have taken for both of us,) moved out 6-9 months ago. He moved in with his fiancee and her parents because ours took advantage of him having a car and would consistently ask him to run errands for them. In comparison to the treatment I've always gotten and still get, it's paltry, but I suppose I understand. They may not have abused him the way they abused me (emotionally as WELL as physically,) but they abused their relationship with him, and he is only 24--he needed some freedom. So he left, taking only what he needed, and leaving behind ten years of accumulated junk. Literally mountains of clothes that he hasn't worn, nor has he been ABLE to wear, since high school. I'm talking piles, the tops of which are much closer to the ceiling than the floor. Jumbled of cords and shoes FULL of dust and animal hair, as he never dusted once in the entire time he lived here. A two foot deep stack of papers, folders, vinyl Halloween masks, belts, old notebooks, and random dead electronics, on the marble top of an antique wash stand that belongs to my parents. The room is, pardon my French, a right proper cluster fuck.

But it has a bed, and a ceiling fan, and a large dresser (though THAT is inaccessible due to the mountain of clothes,) so I moved in. Granted, I myself have been horribly depressed since quitting opiates, leaving an abusive relationship, and moving home, so my own space, as tiny as it was, is crammed with my own mess. I left it mostly the way it was, and moved into his room.

In the past months, I've done SOME work on each room, but have adamantly maintained that he needs to find time to come home, and clean up his own shit. HE has maintained that he'll get around to it. My parents have become incredibly upset with, you guessed it, ME, over the state of BOTH rooms. At first, I flat refused to take any initiative into cleaning up after him. As the months have dragged on, however, I've done more about it, primarily because every time they start a fight with me about it, the threats get worse, and less vague.

Yesterday, I gathered a black trash bag full of trash from my former room, and another bag of clothes to take to Goodwill. However, my cat had a really bad reaction to some medicine we tried for the first time, and I didn't get as much done as I had planned. My brother was home to visit on Sunday, and said he had three days off starting today, and that he would be here to do some work.

Today, at 3:30, still no brother, Dad walks past my room and just stares at the mountain of clothes. I braced myself for impact and it started. I refused, over and over, to escalate the confrontation, but he literally stood in my doorway and stared silently at me for a solid minute (I counted the ticks from the bathroom clock for sixty seconds,) before I finally broke. The culmination of today's confrontation is him holding over my head the need for a place to live, and telling me that if I don't clean up Clothing Mountain, he's going to legally evict me. I relayed all of this to my brother, who said he won't be here today, but "maybe tomorrow or Thursday," and told him that I HOPE that HE cares enough about me to step up and take care of this, but I'm not holding my breath; as soon as I post this, I'm grabbing some trash bags and bagging up as much of his clothing as I can before my myriad of health issues can burn me out for the day. And then I have to push farther and clean up more in my old room.

I'm so tired of being the scapegoat. I'm genuinely grateful that I took the brunt of it when we were growing up, but we're adults, and it still happens. And I'm fuckin sick of it.