Letter To My Sister. Installment 3.

. . . continued . . .

Dear Sister,

Negotiation is a non-option for you, that you have made clear to me now. Still, how has my trying to get you to sit with me at the table done you any specific harm?

All my life the autist has got off scott free acting like a baby…. Bring out the Willow. But no, but…it’s obviously not healthy for you to be left that wild.

You hold up your hands up in a wimpy defense, with the argument that your development was stunted by inadequate parenting, a bossy older and over-intellectualisation before age 5. You claim to have been pushed out into the world at the age of a toddler without the benefits of a nurtured childhood. It sounds like we were locked up in the cellar! To add insult to injury, you tell me that I am no more than an adolescent myself. This you base on my financial dependence on my parents and the struggle I still have to let go of my desire to help them spiritually.

All this is true about me. But then you also say I broke with the family back in the late 80’s already, bringing my choice to return to a place of self-empowerment against me. Point in question being, what is it all to you now, whatever happened, or more often the case, did not happen at all like that. Sure, it’s all subjective, but we aren’t even comparing notes here, for you state that you have no memories of your life as a child. You describe time then as a bubble and all that went on around you could not pierce through it.

You blame me for not understanding how you can have so little affection for your big sister, who adored you and looked out for you from day one. You wouldn't know about that, but at any rate, that already sounds pretty selfish. Did I ask if you wanted me to?

You pride yourself on wanting nothing from me. You wish I had left you alone (to read your books, instead of snapping them shut to provoke you back into your childhood). If I ruined your life as a five year old, then what about me? You weren't bags of fun, exactly, were you. Perhaps, you can explain my tendency to dominate our relationship by a force of habit. Am I betraying pent up frustrations about you? I don't think they existed, I really don't, until you told me I had them. Aiming to please, I suppose, call me a faciliatator, I am through saving you from yourself, I'll be as resentful as you need me to be. But not for long.

It is not easy that I am the only one who finds you severely mentally ill. I have to be careful, because every time I point this the finger, it gets pointed back. Our parents know you are not happy, but it’s best for them not to think about it too much. They really believe that it’s best for you, too. Which makes me so detrimental for you to be around. I am starting to see the warped dynamic you guys call your comfort zone and how there is no shifting any of you out of it. I’d only be crazy to try.

You proffer me an entirely new angle. Psychologically not an uninteresting one. Maybe, the lengths I have gone through for you make you feel guilty. Regular folk might say doing something, though, shows you care. But I have my reservations and suspect alterior motives just like you, for most charitable acts (passifying one's own guilt!); only I had not applied this notion to myself. We know that shame never helped anyone and only seems to aggravate auto- aggression or (emotional) self-harm; but isn’t shame ultimately a marker for not being who you really are?

When I asked you what makes you dislike me so you could be very cut and dry. I am too erratic, unpredictable, emotional and spiritual. True enough, again. I am a bit of a sprite, but that is my saving grace, or I’d be worse off than depressed. Intense and extreme as I can be on a stormy night when moon is dark and the Erlkönig calls, I would simply not be here on Earth anymore.

Any which way: you don’t like me because I disturb you more than you already know yourself to be. That is an awful thing for me to accept, but if I can’t change it, then accept it I must. It bugs me tremendously that I have failed. This in turn you find despicably selfish of me, which is the biggest slap in the face, yet, but strictly esoterically seen, also there you might be onto something very profound.

I wholeheartedly underpin Dostoevsky’s scintillating understanding that we ought all of us to feel responsible for everyone. How this pans out successfully is a different topic (which I have been writing about profusely for years already, but I know better than to hope you might be interested in sharing my thoughts). If you accuse me of “ranting”on, it is presumably regards my observations of the negligence I charge our parents of. I do not mean to blame them in any traditional, psycho-analytical way and hold them accountable - it would never work. It’s our problem now, anyway.

Besides our parents are only human and hurting too. They themselves are damaged products of the narrow-minded and curbing 40’s and 50’s too. It made them hold up freedom as the highest good, which is not a bad thing, but you still have to colour it in. Leaving us girls entirely free to become whatever we wanted to be is not the problem. Not interfering with us at all, however, borders on disinterest. I can’t say I know what it really is. It’s complex, like it always is for frazzled souls. Slowly freezing over.

. . . to be continued . . .