An Epic Recount Of When You Blew Up At Me Last Year

Not Vesuvius. Close enough.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

I’m tired and awake.

I need to get to the next thing, cancer research for my sister and us, and then language. And then community.

So this is going to be fast (ETA: probably the longest post I’ve written on my sister, not fast at all, took a long time). It just helps me to breathe.

I called and emailed more places for finding more work to save for my ballet program.

I am tired and am not calling or emailing anymore places today.

I have to work at Walmart later. I don’t feel like working, working, working all day.

And I haven’t taken class in a while, but I also have to start building community, this first. So I have names to start to build the branches.

At Walmart yesterday, and sometimes, I see grandparents getting things for grandchildren. I never have had this, where I had a grandparent come to a graduation or a dance recital. To share their story. I realize that this really hurts me inside. I saw a grandmother getting graduation favors for her grandson — I saw another one for I think her granddaughter, clothes for her.

This is part of my lack of roots and having to find them. So when I see that my older sister blows up at me or has issues with me, I realize that it is not really me, I mean, I do have to improve how I relate to her. It is me for some, but bigger than me, I do feel overall that the explosion is trauma-based. Has she thought of this, that we have never experienced this second circle of generational love? And the separation we have experienced in our lives? The abandonment?

Blogging and letting a place like Walmart teach me its lessons — from my improving my time to seeing grandparents and parents relate to their children positively — I hope that it gets me to Point B.

I will also do something a person commented gave as advice.

Now as I call agencies in Georgia, I will listen to the gospel music that I was acquainted with growing up. When I start writing about myself again, this will be a post. One more step.

So let me just do a bullet list of all of the things that my older sister said to me out of hurt and anger on the phone. I am still sifting through what she was right about, and also what is coded as a way that something more is said underneath the words, reading between the lines. Also what she was wrong about.

It hurt me a lot. I did this to her when I was 24 and actually exorcising the awful experiences I’d had onto her, and also how she had treated me, dismissing me so much in my life actually, though she is unaware still. I have to process this all too. I apologized to her for blowing up on her. She will never to me I am sure — the older sibling dynamic, again, an oppression.

You Blew Up At Me And It Hurt. Here Is What You Said To Me — Please Transform This God

1. I am the most selfish person you have ever met. I do not ask about you, or my nephew, or your life. “You don’t ask about my health,” you said to me. No I don’t. But I was there for our sister when she was diagnosed, and you weren’t picking up your calls until days later…that was a real irony to what you’d said to me. Still, I’m sorry and have to be better with learning about you and acknowledging you and your family. We never had that relationship over the years though, but I don’t know, maybe that can change. I hope that can change.
2. I was hurtful toward C****, my older brother who abused another sibling, causing shock to the body, to cause hormone imbalance which caused illness. Intrafamilial incest is something that is a generational curse I think — uncovering more. I also was mean to him and I have to blog about this too. But he separated himself actually from everyone once confronted so it’s just a mess.
3. I did not confront him fast enough for you. Taking a year to call was too long to you. I called when I had the strength. Did you talk with the same anger toward M*****, my younger brother? See, if she did not, this is what I mean. This gendered-anger toward a girl and not a boy. I expressed the same anger with her when I blew up on her, though I observe that I was angry at boys/men too and hurt them too. Not good, but maybe it is not as much misogynoir as I thought I had toward her in blowing up at her actually. Hmmm…
4. I was hurtful in going to a dance class while visiting our mother during the weekend when she was sick in the hospital. I didn’t know how bad it was and yes, I should have exercised better judgement.
5. Do I have friends? You asked me this question. “Do you even have friends!” Not really, actually. You were mad that I asked your friend for learning about becoming a lawyer and not you. But C****, he was a lawyer and you weren’t. So I’m sorry and will start to recognize and see you, and be respectful of how you have helped me by asking you, too. I see that you felt slighted. Still, our mom went to law school and you didn’t even get mad that I didn’t default to her first. I should have asked her actually, and not your friend. Our mother, not your friend, not you. But I will ask you in the future simply to acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments, and give you a seat at the table.
6. You want to keep your son away from me because you think I have a problem with light-skinned people. It is yet another way to discount my lived experiences and subconsciously use your mixed son to compete with my full Black, deeply melanated, female experience. It won’t work. We’re not in the same dimensions with our experiences — first off he is born with male privilege, too, not just light-skinned privilege. So I will just be mindful and not talk about race and colorism around you. You are in an interracial relationship, as is another sibling, and I will let you lead. Because I do not think that my full experience will ever really have a place in your world. It never did. So I will mold to you. It is a way to protect you as someone who needs to start seeing you. I am closer to you in what I feel I have observed and know, so I will take that responsibility.
7. You told me I probably have a bad relationship with other siblings because I’m so self-centered. I am working on this and yes, it is not the best, can be better. It is not bad though, the relationships. But because I am so selfish, I am therefore bad with others. I get it. Thanks…*eyebrow raise*
8. You said I should take money still from my father who abused me too. That shows me that you have not really worked through your own experience. He hurt us both. Why would you take blood money? It is not clean. Why would you encourage me to do that? Again, allowing me to see that maybe you have not worked through your soul-theft enough, and then I see how trauma could indirectly inform your blowing up on me.
9. You said to me that you can make the world as you want, that you can create a world that does not have to always be impacted by race and colorism. In response to my bad experiences in Denver. I said no you can’t and that is what started the blowing up call. “What do you want from me?” you said before going off. It is a subconscious way to again clip my wings. This perspective will not acknowledge when a person really experiences something bad because denial helps protect you from the severity of the world. Again, I will take your lead. Sometimes you have to respect denial — it is a way to deal with trauma, again. You have to, I will have to respect this.
10. I am not fun to talk to. That you’re “done with me!”, that maybe “some people you just don’t talk to”. You’re done talking to me now.

This is all. I was talking to my one friend yesterday and telling her how I realize that my sister never really congratulated me on getting a full scholarship to college. She never did. And I look at the things that I didn’t acknowledge with her and want to improve that.

I just have to let it be but express my hurt here still, acknowledging the small ways in which the message is that maybe you want to subconsciously clip my wings — not acknowledging my accomplishment, it felt that way. It feels that way when a person does not acknowledge something that you worked hard to achieve. So again, maybe I do not ask about you about your life because I observe these things, how you have withheld praise and validation from me — why will I ask about you when you discount in subtle ways who I have been/am and what I have experienced in my life?

Double Invisibility

So this is it. I needed to write this because it is a generational thing of the girl not seeing the girl, or the boy not seeing the girl, or the girl not seeing the boy, more difficult because of gender social stratification. And girl shame filling spaces as best it can, but needing to be released for transformation. I will only wear what fits, C****. So I just want to write this here.

I told my friend yesterday that I think that as I start to see my older sister, and build community properly, that in acknowledging her properly, the small jabs here and there will not be important because I am giving and not taking, meaning that acknowledgement will be reciprocated from the correct places. So the jabs are actually a sign I think that she has not been acknowledged, her wings have been clipped first. My lack of acknowledgement in different ways has clipped her wings as well. So the pattern continues.

So I think that to take all of this and grow forward, I have to be proactive and go back and see the things she has accomplished and see that my clipped wings are a message for me to see her better, to figure out how to give her wings, or wind beneath them so to speak. See her life, acknowledge it, and acknowledge her accomplishments. And let her lead. Again, reading between the lines. And the right people will see me, too. And let what comes from her, know that it is with me giving to her correctly, so it will not really matter. Her response would actually probably be more positive too.

It is spiritual, I think.

So let me go now.

It felt good to talk about this here.

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