I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but it sucks. I feel like a huge bitch for saying that. And the problem isn’t even really happening to me. But I still feel the effects.
My little sister has depression. And I feel like it’s ruining the whole family. Everyone is always so stressed trying to figure out how to help her, how to deal with it. We all want to, we just don’t know how. All she ever does is yell at people, and if you ever try to talk to her, her only response is some bitchy comment. I love her, but I hate what she is doing. She yells at my mom all the time, and I hate it. All I want to do is leave the house, to get away. But I can’t. I try to stay strong. I know I can’t run, I need to stay, and try and be supportive, but it’s so hard with how she acts. No one wants to be around her, then she complains about it and yells more. I want to yell back, but that wouldn’t help anything, would it?
All her Facebook status’ are always about death and sadness. Suffering and how bad her life is. When it’s not bad at all. I just really wish she could see what life really is, instead of how she sees it.
I’m scared that when I leave to go back to school, she won’t be here when I come home.
My name is Tali. I am 21. A recently discovered gay woman. What I have been working on recently is not knowing things. I realize that inherently fucks with this project and for that I am sorry. I have spent my life thinking I had myself and the world all figured out. I don’t. For the first time in my life I can say that I feel emotional and personal growth. No intellectual bullshit. Real fucking emotion. The type that you have to lay in bed, cry on the street corner, and fuck random people to process. The type that oozes from your conscience, subconscious, and heart all at the same time. My name is Tali I just broke up with my first love and for the first time in a long time, I feel like a raw, real human being should. Open-ended, beautiful, unknowing, and entranced by the delicious ambiguity of NOT KNOWING.
I consider myself an only child with a sibling. I am the younger sister of a man with severe autism. He is 1½ years older than me & we have never had a conversation. I am afraid of him. My parents cannot accept the fact that I refuse to have a relationship with him. I will not take care of him when they no longer can. He still lives in the house where I grew up. Someday I hope to tell my parents how terrible it was to grow up in his violent shadow, but so far I have not had the courage. Wish me luck!
About 3 months ago, my best friends dad died of lung cancer. For all the time I’ve known him, he had never smoked, rarely drank, and was an amazing man. I don’t even know how he got cancer. But once it was all done, and he passed away, I went to his viewing. The one thing that hit me the most was my friends little brother, who was 6, having a death grip on my friends index finger. His name is Sean, and when he saw me he came and gave me a hug. I’m above average height for my age, 15 years old and 5′ 11 1/2″, but the force of this little kid giving me a hug just proved to me that even if someone is not related by blood, they can still care about you and turn to you when they’re in a bad time in their lives.
I want so much out of the next few years to graduate college this May and have anywhere to go from there. I want to be everywhere doing everything and never disappoint anyone
I wanted to avoid writing about it, but nothing else in my life is quite so significant and life altering. I miss being innocent and naive. I miss the optimism and utter lack of understanding for hatred that I had ‘till I was seventeen. Rape is an awful word. It’s a terrible feeling; It changes you and follows you around so closely that 4 ½ years later you can wake up from a random nightmare and struggle to look your boyfriend in the face because you just dreamt of such an awfully horrible thing being done to your body. I guess that’s the worst part about it—the fact that it’s never far from your thoughts. My family has suffered so much sexual abuse it’s unbelievable. I could be OK if it was just me. I can eventually come to understand the guy who decided to take what he wanted from me, even though he knew I didn’t want to give it.
This is all so jumbled—I get like that sometimes when I ramble.
I was two days away from my 17th birthday, in the basement of a friend’s house—watching a movie. We had been semi-friends for years. When he tried moving my hand where it didn’t belong I just pulled away. When he tugged my pants down I tried to pull them up but I wasn’t as strong. I didn’t scream. I didn’t fight. I just cried real quiet. I didn’t think that’s who I was.
I thought I was stronger.
My best friend was only 13 when it happened to her. She’d gotten separated from her friends and was found by a middle-aged horny as fuck wasted asshole who attacked her. She fought back and screamed and was choked nearly to death by him. She didn’t tell anyone for years. She wishes she didn’t fight back because she tried and failed and almost died.
You can’t win.
She’s my baby sister.
I was raised on Disney Princesses and ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ My parents are straight out of Pleasantville—very even tempered, very much in love; Everything that went wrong could be solved by brownies.
I love the world. I love people. I love being introduced to new things and dreaming about the future. But sometimes I’m alone in my car and I think about my sister, or me, or my Grandma who’s addicted to pain pills, and sleeps all day (scares the shit out of me because she was raped by her brother—I don’t want to turn out like that when I’m old) and my knuckles go white on the wheel and my stomach clenches and I know that I am capable of violence.
I miss being innocent and naive.
One of my best friend’s brother died suddenly Christmas Eve at the age of 19. We used to hang out all the time, played baseball and basketball in high school together, and dated two girls who were best friends also. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year before the funeral. After he was done speaking to the congregation at the memorial service, he walked straight over to the casket, knelt on one knee while putting one hand on the head of the casket, and then rested his forehead over his hand for several minutes. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in my tragedy filled life. Lately I’ve been having dreams where the roles were switched… he and his brother were watching my brothers and sister kneeling with their heads on my casket. I wake up with a terrifying combination of emotions, feeling depressed to see my own siblings mourning and hurt, joy that his brother is alive, and guilt that my subconscious could be so selfish to dream of such a thing.