SoC

It's 9:15pm on a Saturday night and I'm sitting alone in my room with the air conditioner blasting, crying and feeling sorry for myself, and utterly ashamed and angry at myself for feeling that way, because I know it's my own fault I'm alone and miserable.

I do not cry. For the longest time I thought I couldn't; I'd forgotten how. But I'm crying now. I'm listening to upbeat, modern swing music and I'm crying, and the juxtaposition is stupidly laughable.

I hate myself. I loathe myself. I'm ugly, and overweight, and I don't have the willpower to do anything about it. I've tried so many times and failed just as many. It's useless. I'm thirty - I'm way too fucking old to still be carrying around all this bullshit baggage from childhood, letting it cripple me, but I don't know how not to. I don't know how to fix myself. It's so ridiculous. I feel so stupid. My intelligence is always the thing I've set store in, the one good thing I've let myself believe I am, and even that's a lie. I get by. I manage. But there is so much I'm not any good at, even intellectually. If I ever took an intelligence test, I'm positive I'd test normal at best.

Speaking of tests, guess what? I took a psychpathy test here http://personality-testing.info/tests/LSRP.php and my "score for primary psychopathy was higher than 91.63% of people who have taken this test" and my "score for secondary psychopathy was higher than 49.13% of people who have taken this test." Just lovely. My score on the Rosenberg self-esteem scale is a whopping two. TWO. Anything lower than fifteen indicates low self-esteem.

I'm laughing now.

It's not kind laughter.

I hate my brother. I wrote about that already. I think siblings suck. I've been watching Hoarders and Intervention on TV (well, on Netflix. We don't have TV because we can't afford it) and these families, over and over they say, oh, my brother or sister's my best friend, blah blah blah. Siblings are awful. There's an angry, hurt, mean part of me that wants to say all my problems would disappear if I'd never had a brother. I would be happy. My dad would have had me, a strong daughter, to play the part of a son instead of the perpetual disappointment my brother is to him. My mother wouldn't have alienated me and my dad by living in a fantasy world where Nathan is perfect and can do no wrong and the rest of the world is conspiring against him.

That's the fantasy. In reality I'm logical and realistic enough to know that, while on the whole things might have been better without my brother, they wouldn't have been perfect. I'm fucked up on my own, regardless. I would have been better. But I wouldn't have been perfect.

But damn it, it's not fair. (And I hear David Bowie in my head now: "You say that so often. I wonder what your basis of comparison is?") If the Goblin King stole my baby brother away, I wouldn't have run the Labyrinth to get him back. Does that make me a terrible person? Probably. I don't care anymore. I don't want to bury the hatchet. I don't want to love him. I'd love to not carry him around on my back anymore, but not for his sake. For my own. He's heavy. I put a tattoo of a beautiful firebird on my back and named her Baggage. I thought if I made my own baggage, it would help symbolically somehow.

It didn't.

And I'm still a whiny little brat asking when I get to have a turn. When do I get a break? He got everything. All the love. All the support. All the help, emotionally, financially... They did everything for him and nothing for me. They got in my way over and over again, kicking me down while pushing him up, and it's not fair. He's abusive, but he's got a wife and is trying to have kids. Our parents did everything to keep me out of college, telling me it wasn't a good idea, not helping at all with money, housing, emotional support, but they did his homework for him. In college. I'm drowning in educational debt and he's got a wife taking care of him financially. I struggled for three years to get my master's degree, and he took even that distinction away from me, going through a "fast-track" online program when the school where "he'd" done his undergrad wouldn't accept him into their graduate program.

Just once, in some way other than growing old, I want to be first. I want to come out on top. I want a job I enjoy, that pays enough money that I can both pay my bills and eat. I want a healthy relationship with my partner, who I love beyond belief; I want to feel like we really are partners instead of me being a burden, a tumor she carries around. I want, if not my biological or adoptive family, a close circle of friends who I can think of as family. I want the option to have a child (ONE) if I want, instead of knowing it's a terrible idea on so many levels, and a luxury we monetarily can't afford.

I want to go on vacation.

I want to feel like my feet are on firm ground, even if I'm wading. I don't want to feel like I'm drowning anymore, every second or third wave sucking me under.

I want to be loved.

I want to feel worthy of being loved.

I don't know how to do that. And the Internet has failed me here; it hasn't given me any good answers.

I wasn't allowed to play video games as a kid, but even I know that the Konami Code is up up, down down, left right, left right, BA. The Konami Code for life is having good looks, money, and a likeable personality. I've got none of those things...so a cheat sheet would be nice. Or a manual?

Or even just a clue?

The Eyes

When I was eight or so, soon after the big move from San Diego to Seattle, I told my mother that I felt eyes on me, watching me. It was a creepy feeling; I remember being unnerved by it, which is why I told. I tried to explain, but I've never been very good at making myself understood by voice rather than writing. My mother's response was that I was being ridiculous. Nobody around me - not the other latchkey kids in before-and-after-school care, or the kids in my class, or adults in public - cared enough about me to watch me.

But that wasn't what I meant. I didn't mean that I thought real, corporeal people were watching me. I meant that I felt eyes. Not people, just eyes.

I was afraid for a while. I didn't know what I was feeling, or why, and I gave up on my mother being of any use.  On my own, to cope, I invented a fantasy to help me feel better.  I started to pretend that the eyes I felt were my parents, my biological family, watching over me. Except, because a) I was young and b) I knew nothing about my biological family, I inserted couples from books, or movies, or TV shows that I was familiar with. Or I pretended the eyes were people from historical dramas - Little House on the Prairie, or Dr. Quinn - getting a peek at modern times.  Sometimes I was the daughter of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Other days, frontier folk marveled at automobiles and modern clothing inside my head.

The eyes didn't go away as I got older, but they did change somewhat, and so did the fantasies. I started covering heater vents in the houses we lived in, even though I knew, intellectually, there was nobody there. I got yelled at for it, particularly if I forgot and left a towel covering a vent in the bathroom. My mother screamed that it was a fire hazard, and I suppose she was probably at least somewhat correct. I didn't tell her why I did it. I was old enough, by then, to know that it wasn't normal to feel eyes watching me all the time.

The fantasies didn't go away, either, but they also changed.  By high school, I was experiencing what I now understand is pretty classic depression. Particularly after the last move from Oregon to Washington when I was a junior, I was done. With everything. I knew I was gay. I'd rejected Christianity and was toying with the idea of neopaganism, but I didn't really have enough faith even for that. I didn't trust my parents, hated my brother, and had been kept from my extended family due to a feud between my father, his siblings, and his father.  I loathed my new school and everything in it. Two of my teachers had taken me aside and told me they had nothing they could teach me. There was only one place in the world I wanted to be, and that was a camp on the Oregon coast where I worked during the summer. I'd given up on trying to make friends years ago, because it took me a year and a half to get comfortable anywhere, and we always moved soon after. It just wasn't worth the effort anymore. I didn't want to be at school. I didn't want to be at home. I hated everything. But I didn't have the outlets for destructive behavior that other kids had - I didn't have friends, didn't drive, didn't have a car.  Without those things, I didn't know how to get drugs, obviously wasn't having sex. I didn't have the willpower to become anorexic, or availability of food to get fat. Cutting wasn't a thing yet. But yeah, I was an angry, depressed teen.

I didn't realize it was possible to say no. I didn't realize I actually had a choice about anything in my life, because, while my mother was too busy with my brother to pay attention, I wasn't that sort of kid. I didn't know I could do things on my own, for myself. It never occurred to me that I could stop going to school. It never occurred to me that I had any choice about anything. The fantasies helped me get through, day by day. Like a director determined to make his movie interesting, I made myself get out of bed. I made myself go to school. Not for me, but for the imaginary people in my head who were "watching" me. I tuned out, watching the world around me twice removed, through the lens of the thoughts of these imaginary people in my head. Watching my own life like a movie framed by imaginary narrative made me feel safe in an emotionally unsafe world, and it also interested me just enough to keep me functioning.

I knew it was all imaginary; don't get me wrong. I never heard voices. I never thought I would meet the characters in my head in the real world. But they kept me safe for a long time.

I don't know if I feel the eyes anymore. Maybe I do and I've just lived with the feeling so long that it doesn't prick at me anymore. Maybe the depression has become so strong that the eyes have disappeared, like many other parts of the vivid inner life I used to lead. I'm not terrified of the dark anymore, which I was well into my twenties. I still get vivid nightmares, but I can go back to sleep again afterward. I don't startle out of nowhere and know my parents are dead, like I used to.  I'm utterly atheistic, though I used to be both superstitious and somewhat religious.

My brain is a mystery to me. I don't know why I felt disembodied eyes staring at me as a kid, and I don't know if they'll come back.  Hell, I don't know if they ever left. All I know is that I learned to lean on them rather than fear them. Whether that's healthy or not, I have no idea.

Hate

I hate my brother.

I don't use that word lightly...and yet, maybe I do, because I'm not one hundred percent sure what it means. I think the definition of hate is fluid, and perhaps different for different people.  For me, I do believe I hate him.

Hate takes a lot of energy, consciously and not-so-consciously. One of the major symptoms of my depression is exhaustion; I don't have energy to spare. And it makes me even angrier that he takes so much of my energy away from me.  That I let him take that energy, because I don't know how to stop it. I would love to write him off completely, to cut him out of my life fully, but I've only been able to do so superficially. He lingers in the lining, sullen threads that refuse to be ripped away. I can keep him out of my line of sight.  But I can't keep him out of my dreams, or my energy supply.

My parents always wanted a boy, so I guess it was inevitable that, while I asked for a sister, what they brought home would be...sub-par, to my five-year-old mind. He and I were complete opposites from the start. I'd been a quiet baby, a small baby. Underweight, solemn, but happy for attention. Foster parents and later my adoptive parents crowed that they could take me anywhere. I never cried or fussed. I sat in a stroller or someone's arms, big eyes watching everything. Eventually I fell asleep.

From the minute he came home, Nathan was different.  He was loud, and fat - not just double chins, but three or four, depending on his position. He was always hot, so the huge mat of black hair on top of his head constantly dripped.  He screamed. He wiggled. His birth mother was a drug addict, his birth father a Mexican national. My parents adored him from the start.

As he grew, I like to think there were warning signs, but this was the late 80's and early 90's. I have no idea whether there were psychiatrists, psychologists, or other professionals considering that toddler misbehavior was anything but that: a normal phase for toddlers to go through.

When he was two, Nathan had a bad anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter, and was rushed to the hospital. Peanuts, peanut butter, and even the special peanut butter cookies I made with my grandma, were outlawed from the house. I complained bitterly, especially about the cookies. That was something special I did with my grandma, from a recipe handed down through the family.  My brother was now encroaching not only on my house, my parents, and my life there, but also my special time with my grandmother, who I adored.

I distinctly remember one incident, where I was frustrated by something he'd done. He was still in a crib. I took all of the stuffed animals in the house - mine, his, my mother's, and the ones from the daycare she ran out of the garage - and piled them over him in his crib. My parents snapped photos; they thought it was cute that I was "sharing." In reality, I was trying to bury him.  To keep him contained, from infiltrating more and more into my world, pushing me out.  I had the normal jealousy of a kid who suddenly has a younger sibling, but things didn't settle down. The older he got, the worse it became.  And I wasn't a stupid kid. I knew my parents wanted a boy; that I was a foster kid they'd chosen to keep, whereas he'd been searched for, sought after, yearned for. The fishing, hiking, and camping trips with my dad ended, very abruptly.  He didn't need to pretend with me anymore. He had a real son now.

Except, there was something wrong with Nathan, something neither of my parents wanted to either see or admit.  His Terrible Twos stretched into Terrible Threes, then Fours, Fives, Sixes.

Like any home with small children, the refrigerator in our house was decorated with my artwork. He would rip it to pieces. Not just as a baby who you'd expect not to know better, but all throughout his childhood. "You can't get mad at him," my mother would tell me, while she held him and stroked his hair.  "He's impulsive. He can't help himself."

But it wasn't just artwork - nothing in the house was safe from him. I was forced, extremely unwillingly, to share my toys, most of which he then broke. My mother scolded me, and said I was a selfish, mean girl, and needed to share.  I shared great at school (and latchkey programs, after we moved and my mother no longer had her own daycare). With other children, she scolded that I was too trusting, that I shouldn't share so much. Other children were mean and greedy; they'd take my things and wouldn't give them back. Nathan, though? Nathan was a saint. He never did anything wrong in her eyes and if he did, "You can't get mad at him for it."

I thought we were pretty poor growing up, especially after we moved away from San Diego and my beloved grandma.  I didn't get much in the way of new toys or clothes, and what clothes I did get often came from thrift stores or hand-me-downs from older cousins. Turns out, we weren't nearly as bad off as I'd assumed. My parents were just terrified of debt, to the point where every cent they made went, not to toys or vacations or good food, but to paying off their mortgage. I don't blame them for the choice they made - it was their money. But, growing up, I sincerely believed we were one breath away from a homeless shelter, which was far from reality.  I can remember being so sick of rice, and begging for potatoes instead, and my mother saying no, that rice was cheaper than potatoes. She was probably right...by a few cents.

One Christmas, though, I got a model horse. He was just an off-brand thing, about the size of the branded Barbie horses that were all the rage. But I loved him.  He was jointed, so you could pretend to walk him around and pose him.  I loved that horse from the minute I saw him. He was the only toy I got that Christmas - I got some clothes, too, I think, and we all had stockings with an orange, an apple, and maybe some candy. But for me, that horse was my whole Christmas and I loved him.

That afternoon, Christmas afternoon, my mother told me to share my new horse with my brother.  I refused. I knew he'd break it. I got called cruel, and heartless, and told that this was Christmas, and eventually she took the toy from me and gave it to him.

He snapped one of the legs off within ten seconds, just like I knew he would.

My dad glued the leg back together, but it wouldn't move anymore. My jointed horse was permanently crippled the day I got it, because my mother made me "share" it when I knew it would only get broken if I did.

This wasn't a singular episode; it happened over and over in the house.  I had a beautiful shimmering kite of translucent plastic with a unicorn on it - a prized possession. Going to the park and flying my kite while my parents tried to relax and chased after Nathan was one of my favorite things. My mother made me "let Nathan have a turn." He threw the string in the air and laughed. No more kite.

And the thing was, every single time, I knew what was going to happen. I knew he was going to break or lose my things, and I didn't have a lot to begin with. When I tried to protest, I got called mean, cruel, selfish, heartless, a witch...the names went on and on. And when the inevitable happened, they didn't see the pattern I saw. They said I wasn't allowed to be angry, or blame him. They never offered to replace anything.

The last thing he ruined was the pet dog.

Mozart was a purebred German Shepherd, given to us because he had a limp as a puppy. The breeders, friends of my fathers, bred and trained dogs for the local police department.  We were living in Salem, Oregon by this point, after many, many moves.  He was a gangly black and tan thing, small and staggering, with huge bat ears and an almost bald belly.  I'm a cat person, but I don't mind dogs. I was thirteen or fourteen by this time. I slept in the garage with the puppy when he whined, because he wasn't used to being alone and my parents didn't want him sleeping in the house until he was housebroken.

I named him Mozart, in the hope that it would give the awkward little bat-puppy some elegance to grow into. The family almost immediately shortened it to Moe - as in, one of the Three Stooges.  My parents soon found out that a dog bred for police work doesn't necessarily make a good family pet.  He failed puppy kindergarten. Eventually they took him to a trainer who specialized in German Shepherds, and that seemed to help, but Moe needed a job to do. He was too smart and too energetic to just sit at home.  I did my best - I would run with him in the evenings, around and around the neighborhood. He loved it. But he was still a Shepherd bred for work, work that as a pet he just wasn't getting. He bit me once - I still have a scar on my palm.  He bit my mother.  Oddly enough, he was terrified of the two cats in the house, and would whine and turn tail when they hissed at him.

My mom suffers from undiagnosed chronic pain, and taking such a big, energetic dog out became too much for her. My brother was forbidden to take him out alone - at least my parents got one thing right.  My dad started to work more and more, and was never home.  My mother poured her love into that dog; Moe was her baby just as much as Nathan was.  But as Moe became less and less socialized, he became more and more protective and territorial.  We so rarely had anyone in the house that he didn't react well around strangers.  The rule was made that Moe should be locked up in the laundry room if anyone came to the house.

Time passed; we moved again. This last move was beyond the last straw for me; I was done. I wanted nothing more from these people, because they didn't seem to care what I thought and felt. I was tired of the name-calling, the blame, the isolation.  I moved to Virginia for college, and was glad to go. Later I heard through my grandmother - my mother, for whatever reason, wouldn't tell me herself - that the dog had to be put down. Nathan had had a friend or two over - something I was never allowed to do when I lived there - and he had, against all rules and common sense, let the dog out. Moe bit one of the boys, and that was the end of it.  My mother loved that dog like a child, but it didn't matter. There were never any consequences, any punishment, any recrimination, for Nathan. Only for the dog, who didn't know any better.

I'm frustrated with my parents for the way our family functioned, yes, but I don't hate them. I do hate my brother. If he'd never been part of my life, things wouldn't have been perfect, but they'd have been better. I truly believe that. Maybe my parents would have noticed me. Maybe when they saw me struggling, hurting, they would have had the time and energy to care.  Maybe I would have been allowed to have friends over. Maybe I would have been allowed to have friends, period.  Maybe I'd have a sense of home - what home is, and what it's supposed to be.

I haven't been in the same room with my brother in at least three years, maybe longer. I have a deep sense of relief, but also of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  He's not dead. I can't escape him forever. What do I do regarding family get-togethers, weddings, etc? Saying, "I'll come if Nathan isn't going to be there," is still letting him run my life, like he did all through my childhood.

In my perfect world, he'd be committed, locked in a facility somewhere, where he can't hurt anybody.  My parents won't admit the physical violence that was pervasive in our house, growing up. But it was there, and it all came from him.  He hurt my mom all the time.  He hurt the animals in the household.  He hurt me until I got big enough to scare him, when I was twelve or so. Even then, there was "physical violence" toward me, in that he had no respect for my boundaries.  He knew I didn't like to be touched, particularly by him, so he would lick me, or poke me, or rub up against me. If I pushed him away with a hand or a foot, I got in trouble. He thought it was hilarious, while I felt sickened and like I wanted to take a hot shower and scrub it all away, every single time.  I got so mad and frustrated, I would crawl into my closet and cry, because there was nothing I could do. I was powerless.

His violence was strange to me. It didn't stem from anger, necessarily.  It just...was.  And it wasn't just childish accident.  I was visiting my parents for a brief time while my brother was in college, still living at home (an option never offered to me). My mother had an old, retired greyhound she had adopted, a quiet female unsteady on her feet and slowly dying of cancer.  My brother was in the kitchen, and he saw the dog coming into the room.  He grabbed the refrigerator door and slammed it open in her face, causing her to fall down.  As she struggled to right herself in the narrow space, he howled with laughter.  Just one of many incidents.  He always hated the fruit we got in our stockings at Christmas, so he would throw his apple and orange at one or another of us as he pulled it from the stocking.  Now that he's older, he's obsessed with weapons. Not guns as far as I know, but knives, swords, bows and arrows.  He's not a hunter, but he carries a ridiculously oversized hunting knife around with him like normal people might carry a little pocket knife.

He worked at the YMCA for a short time in high school, monitoring the game room.  An infraction including inappropriate contact with an underage girl made the Y offer him a choice: quit or be fired.  He chose to quit, and so there's nothing on his record.

And now he's married.  My mother always said she wanted him to go straight from her care to the care of a good wife, and it seems she got her wish.  I pity the girl, but it was her choice. The ones who don't have a choice, however, are the kids they claim to want. His wife had a miscarriage a year or so ago, and I've studiously been ignoring any hints of information about this plan.  He's unemployed, and has been for quite some time. And I'm so afraid for any kid that might come into that home. But what can I do? I don't think I can do anything except separate myself from the situation, and I don't think I'm doing even that particularly well.

So why do I say I hate him? To me, it's this: I don't want him to have a happy life.  Childish as it sounds, he fucked up my childhood, and it's not fair. I want bad stuff to happen to him.  I want him to suffer. If he needed an organ transplant to live, I wouldn't get tested to see if I was a match. I wouldn't give it to him. I hope his wife, who seems to be a genuinely gentle, caring girl, divorces him before anything too awful happens to her.

Mostly, I want my parents to acknowledge that all of this happened, and that it hurt me. I want them to own up to everything. I want an apology.  And I know I'll never get one.  So what happens now? What can I do to heal, knowing I'll never get what I want from them?