I’m starting to recognize the source of my blues. A few weeks ago, I had a terrible conversation. My sister shared a secret she had never told anyone; it was so horrible, that at first, I laughed. An awful, horrible, painful utterance.
Afterwards, we both cried for a few hours.The night, I put her to bed on my couch, and kissed her goodnight. She told me I should write a book about her. Her struggles with her mental illness. Her time in a reform boarding school. The court case for custody of her that was fought between my aunts and my parents when she escaped by making a run for it in the Bronx Zoo. Her subsequent battles with severe mania and depression.
Writing the book, we both think, might help people truly understand what it means to live with a mind that sees the world in delusions. It might help society to better take care of such people. But I know, when it comes down to it, she’ll never agree to it. In fact, I’ll probably have to take down this post as soon as someone in my family reads it.
Trauma lies dormant; it creeps up when stirred, in the form of a sort of hopelessness projected on the present time. When it manifests, you often don’t know it’s entered your consciousness. Perhaps it’s not trauma at all, but rather a glitch in your own mind? Or the weather? Mostly you feel bad for feeling bad at all when nothing is the matter.
This past weekend, I went home for an afternoon. For the first time in a while, my sister was in a bad state. After an afternoon of tension, bursts of screaming and sobbing, I was exhausted.
Before I left, I went up to her room. She was leaning out the window, smoking a cigarette. Her face was raw from crying. As she began to air her many grievances against my mother, who herself is a wavering target, unable to nail on the fine line between right and wrong, I felt a desperate urge to flee. The guilt that comes along with the responsibility of knowing someone like my sister is itself crushing. You detach to save yourself, but are always drawn back. Because if you don’t help them, then who will? There are no lessons to be learned. No rock bottoms. There is only a stubborn routine that can be established, which much be carefully monitored, to prevent from major slippages. To really take care of someone like my sister, you must give your own life.
“I’ll never be normal,” she told me on my couch, those weeks ago. “I’ll never be able to live an ordinary life.”
And I sobbed along with her, because I knew she was right.
