What do you do when you need a break but aren't allowed to slow down any time soon? (psychologist, counselor)

[cognitivelydissonant]

My mind is such a scattered place anymore that I doubt that any of what I'm about to say will even make much sense, but I'll try?

My life has been a never-ending downward spiral for the past several years, and I think I'm pretty close to the breaking point. I kind of wish I would get there and have a complete nervous breakdown already so that maybe people will see that I'm seriously not okay and let me take a break for once.

I don't really know how to explain my situation without just starting from the very beginning, so I'll just do that. When I was a freshman in high school, I started having strange neurological health issues like my sense of taste stopped working, I had off and on blurred vision, and eventually right before I graduated, I began having periodic dizzy spells. I was freaked out and convinced I had cancer or something, so I basically hid these issues from everyone for as long as I could get away with it. My dad made me go to college even though I didn't want to because I hated leaving my house because it was scary to due to the random dizzy spells. I wanted to major in something health industry related, but I figured, "How on earth am I going to work with patients if I keep getting dizzy like this?" so I majored in English instead. I was pretty good at writing, so I figured I'd just become a freelance writer and then I could work from home so I'd never have to worry about being dizzy at work. Except eventually, I developed these non-stop excruciating headaches and cognitive issues, including difficulty remembering words. So I was an English major having to constantly write papers, and it was an miserable, slow process because I would have to sit there and pull up a thesaurus to try and search for words that I couldn't remember. That issue has gotten a little bit better, but I still have it pretty badly. So college sucked, but I managed to get through it and graduated in 2011.

Once I graduated, I needed to figure out what to do with myself but was scared of looking for jobs because 1) I was completely ill-equipped for every job out there. I have zero skills unless you count stumbling through a school paper, and 2) the health issues hadn't gone anywhere. I discovered a few websites where you can apply for freelance jobs to do from home, so I started doing those to save up money. I got really lucky with a data entry job that lasted a year and a half before the project wrapped up and was making $540 a week doing it. Not a ton of money considering I had to work about 60 hours a week to make it, but enough to build up a small savings account and not feel like I was completely useless for once. I also finally went to a doctor since I still hadn't gotten over my fear of going to one by that point. That turned out to be completely useless. I must have been to at least 12 doctors at this point. No one has anything to tell me other than that I had (but no longer have) a B12 deficiency. One neurologist said there was brain atrophy on my scan but "not enough to be significant." Another one said there was a small lesion on my brain, but it was too small to mean anything. So basically a ton of "I dunno. Can't help you."

I decided a few months back that I simply couldn't continue living my adult life in the bedroom of my dad's house doing work that made me miserable, so I was going to get an apartment and go back to school to study something that would actually give me a skill set and a secure future. I got the crazy idea in my head that I would take the pre-requisite courses needed to apply to med schools so I could hopefully go on to become the doctor I once wanted to be. Of course this involves a LOT more work than just taking a few classes, and I'm in over my head. This isn't the part that's got me on the verge of a nervous breakdown, though. This is what I want to be doing. It's everything else that's the problem. I still deal with the cognitive problems that showed up a few years ago, so I highly doubt I'm even smart enough to pull it off, but aside from that, I have no clue how I'm going to manage to keep myself afloat financially or survive this last month living in my dad's house without going insane.

That leads me to the other ginormous source of misery in my life that I didn't mention earlier because I didn't really know where to fit it in. My younger (20-year-old) sister is, for lack of a better word, a monster. She's manipulative, she's violent, and she fits the definition of a narcissist to a T. She legitimately believes that everyone around her exists in her life to do what she wants them to do and not do what she doesn't want them to do, so if I don't sit quietly in my bedroom all day and not get in her way, she starts to bully me. She's bulimic and proud of it, so she presses her face up against my bedroom door and shouts that I'm a "fat b----" just because she knows I have really low self esteem, and it's going to send me into a depressive episode for the remainder of the day. If I try to stick up for myself or do anything she doesn't want me to do, she gets verbally abusive and sometimes even punches down my bedroom door. My bedroom door is held together with nails from all of the times she's knocked it down. Like before, she wanted me to write her school paper for her, and I told her I had work to do and my head was throbbing, so I couldn't. This set her off screaming that she'd ought to beat me up and I was useless and needed to get the h--- out of the house and stuff, which led to me sitting in my room shaking and crying for hours; I still haven't stopped crying. I'm such a nervous wreck because of her, and my dad refuses to kick her out of the house because "he could never do that to any of his children." I mean, at least I'll be in my own apartment in a month and away from her. I'm just constantly on edge because of her and don't even know how to deal with it any longer. One time, I even told my dad that I was afraid she was going to drive me to hurt myself because I've run out of other ways to cope with her tormenting me, and he laughed at me. I asked what was so funny, and he said, "The way you think is funny." I wasn't kidding, though. That was my way of trying to get him to understand that I really can't take it, and he just laughed at me. This is the problem. NO ONE takes me seriously. Not even the counselor I went to a while back. She just kept telling me that my problems aren't really problems, and I need to just stop thinking of them as problems. It's like no matter how hard I try to show people I'm bursting at the seams and need help, they think I'm joking or just being overdramatic.

I feel like I've got too much on my hands to do and figure out on my own, and I just really feel like I need to be allowed to take a break and just take some time to myself to read a book or whatever, but I can't because I need to work, work, work so I can make money to afford the rent I'm about to take on and my other bills. I don't even know if I can do it. I don't have a stable job ever since that project I mentioned came to an end, so I'm just doing little side projects here and there all day long on the internet to bring in what I can. I'm going to try to find a job outside the house when I move, but I doubt I'll find one because I have no skill set, and I'm such a mess, health-wise and emotionally. I've never even job searched outside of online freelance work, so I have no clue what I'm even doing. I don't really have any friends who don't live outside of the computer since I've been locked up inside of my room working on the internet for so long, so I don't really have any support system to turn to. I'm constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown because I feel so stuck and don't know how to get out of this mess my life has come to. I'm crying two to three times a day on average and hardly want to wake up in the morning because it means another day of trying in vain to figure my way out. I feel like I just can't take it all anymore and need permission to stop looking for jobs and working all of the time and just take some time to myself, but I'm not allowed to because money is the bottom line that everything always has to come down to.

I just have no clue what to do. I've been to counselors and psychologists before, but they haven't been helpful at all. Now that I don't have a stable job and have to worry about rent, school books, etc. soon, I couldn't even really afford to see someone. Is there even anything I can do, or do I just keep drifting along until something gives or until I completely lose my mind?