My relationship with my younger brother, who is 11 years old, has been really tough for a long time, maybe around 5-6 years. It’s not because I blame anyone else, like our parents, for the problems we have. It’s just that I’ve been going through some really difficult times with my mental health, and that has made it hard for me to reach out to him.

When it all started, my brother and I were kind of friends, as much as a 5-year-old can be a friend to a 10-year-old. But things have gotten worse between us over time. He purposely tries to bother me and make my life harder. He even says hurtful things to me, like telling me to harm myself. This has become more serious in the past year. It’s tough because he knows about the things I’ve been going through, but he doesn’t seem to care. He once told me to “man up,” which really stuck with me because he was just a 10-year-old at the time.

Sometimes he acts nice to me when he wants something from me or wants to borrow my things. But once he gets what he wants, he goes back to being mean to me. He knows how to manipulate people, probably from his grandmother, and he takes advantage of our dad’s anger issues to make him angry at me. It’s like he enjoys treating me badly and seeing me upset.

He’s now going to a school with a lot of pressure, where they’re preparing him for important tests to get into college in India. As for me, I’m going to a university in another state, which will bring its own pressures and responsibilities. This means I have limited time to fix our relationship. And it’s even harder because I want to move to another country after college, but he doesn’t have similar plans. This gives us even less time to work things out.

I really want to find a way to make things better between us. But it’s really tough when he goes so far as to make me doubt myself or even hurt me physically, using things like chairs, heavy cookware, or even a cricket bat. I just want to have a good relationship with my brother again, and I want it to happen quickly. I need some guidance on what I can do to improve our relationship without cutting him out of my life, because that’s not something I want to do.