Selfish

My sister and I will never be close. Even now that we are both adults, I still find it hard to be in the same room with her. She still lives at home, which is why I avoid visiting for as long as I can. My parents always ask me why I didn't come back home after failing out of college, why I would have rather paid rent and lived by myself than stayed with them until I got back on my feet.

Maybe from an outside perspective, I'm being selfish. It's a completely understandable take. I sometimes feel like I am the selfish one too. It takes every bit of me to tell myself that this distance, as much as it has affected my relationship with my parents, is the best thing for me. Being as far away from her as possible significantly improves my mental health, but even the miles between myself and her don't keep away the long-term effects of growing up under the same roof as a monster.

My severe anxiety is never going to go away. Neither is my depression or paranoia. These mental illnesses that I developed from my childhood hurt me for so long. They were obstacles in romantic relationships, they drove away many of the few friendships I made along the way, they stole my happiness at the most inopportune moments...it all points back to the same thing. It's why I still can't forgive her, as much as I want to and as selfish as it makes me seem. I've spent a lot of my life being too afraid to tell my story because nobody who knew my family would have believed me. I won't let the fear of looking selfish to strangers keep me from telling it now.

In 2017, my sister was officially diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, this being after she put herself in a mental hospital following a really nasty breakup with her ex-boyfriend. I was a senior in high school at the time. My sister had moved out of the house two years ago, and if I'm being completely honest, those two years were the most peaceful in my entire life. When my parents told me that she was in a mental hospital, I hate to admit it, but I was pretty relieved. I thought that that meant my parents would finally listen to me about the things she had done to me when they hadn't been watching or paying attention.

It was wishful thinking. When my sister was released from the mental hospital two weeks later with this new diagnosis, my parents, without any question, let her move back in. I still remember the feeling I got when I saw her sitting in the recliner in the living room again. It was this gut feeling that things were terribly, terribly wrong, and that I was in danger. Of course, for sixteen years of my life, I spent most days with this feeling, so my natural reaction was to suppress this bad feeling. I always thought then that I did it for my parents' sake. They didn't need to know how I felt. How I felt really didn't matter anyway. Now I know that that's not why I hid my feelings. I hid them for my own safety, because nobody would have cared if I did say something. My situation would not have changed. My sister still would have been sitting in that recliner the next day, and I would have been grounded or something stupid for not being understanding. Being grounded would have meant more time at home with my sister, and that was not going to happen.

One night, when my sister was downstairs in her bedroom sleeping, I finally told my parents the truth about my sister. It was a last-stitch effort to get them to see things from my perspective. To me, there was nothing 'borderline' about her diagnosis. She was flat-out psycho. I thought that maybe if I were honest with them and told them I was deeply afraid of her, they would listen and at least remove me from the situation.

"She used to wait until you guys would leave or you weren't around. When we were little, I was so much smaller than her. She would take my arm, twist it behind my back, and shove me against the wall until I agreed to do whatever she said or my crying would bring your attention to us, and then I was just being a crybaby. You guys always believed her too. She was constantly trying to kill me or scare me so I would be afraid of her and would do what she said. When I was little, before I knew how to swim, she tried to drown me by flipping over the raft I was sitting on in the pool. I got stuck under the raft and almost didn't make it back to the surface in time. She chased me with a carving knife when I was ten. She attempted to drown me several more times before realizing I was too big to shove under the water, so she switched to emotionally hurting me instead. She would always fight with me when I had friends over so that they would never want to come over again because they were scared of her. She made sure I knew how immature and annoying I was, all the time, and made sure everybody else thought so too. I didn't have any real friends until she moved out. Ever notice that?" I pleaded.

"I told your sister that she can always come home if she needed to. Right now, she needs us. I know that you're scared. We all are. We wouldn't put you in a situation that is a threat to your safety. I would hope you would want us to do the same for you if you were in this situation," is always what my mom said in response to my concerns about my sister living in the same house as us.

My mom was very wrong, in many ways. Firstly, anywhere that my sister was at was not 'home'. It was a constant state of perpetual anxiety and fear for me, therefore I have no other title for it than absolute Hell. Most importantly, she was wrong about my sister's threat to our safety, as my parents so often were.

A month after my sister came back home, my parents found a suitcase filled with carving knives, rope, and duct tape in my sister's closet while looking for the suitcase for my dad's golfing trip. "We better tell her ex-boyfriend about this," my mom said as the three of us sat together in the living room.

Her ex-boyfriend?? What about us?! For starters, my sister always had the desire to murder me, and pleading insanity surely would have worked with her new diagnosis. Secondly, she also couldn't stand my dad, for other horrible reasons that are an entirely different story, and she would also probably kill him if she had the opportunity. Lastly, my sister was really good at making my mom believe that she did love her, but I am still not convinced to this day that my sister is capable of loving anyone or anything.

Regardless of who this stuff was meant for, I was ready to kick her out right then. This was surely a threat to our safety, right? This was the last straw, right?

The next month, my sister claimed she was going back to the college that she had attended when dating her boyfriend to get some paperwork. When my mother told me this after she had already left, I said, "Are you positive she's not just using that as an excuse to see her ex?"

I also understand if at this point, dear reader, you think that I always assume my sister has the worst intentions. You would likely be correct in that assumption, and it is a fair thing to think that maybe I was not understanding enough of my sister's situation. Breaking up with someone you love is a very difficult thing to overcome, and the support of your family is indeed necessary. That being said, I was right.

Later that night, my mom got a call from my sister's ex-boyfriend. He told her that my sister had come by his house and had started screaming at him. When he threatened to call the police, she got in her car and drove away. By the time the authorities arrived, my sister was already back out on the road. Then, my sister called my mom and was threatening to commit suicide by running her car into a tree or another car. She said she had already taken some pills and that she wanted to die. My dad called the police while my mom stayed on the line with my sister, and luckily, the cops pulled her over before she could endanger another human being. My parents dropped everything to drive the two hours to the hospital my sister was taken to for the pills, which weren't capable of killing her even with the amount she took. My sister was studying to be a nurse, so she absolutely knew those pills wouldn't kill her.

I stayed home alone, and fell asleep in the recliner in our living room. My parents didn't get home until five in the morning. They had to be at work in two hours, both of them being school teachers, and I had to be at school. For the next three weeks, my parents were pretty much broken records. Every single conversation was about Taryn, and it was always the same discussions they always had. They were hyper-focused on her, and while at first I chimed in, eventually I just put in my headphones or went to bed early because I didn't want to talk about it anymore.

I dropped a lot of clubs that I normally participated in my senior year. I lost a lot of friends or realized they really weren't good ones after all. I distanced myself from almost everyone, and nobody really seemed to care or notice. By the time May rolled around and it was time for me to graduate, I was done with high school and done with that small town that I had grown up in my entire life. I couldn't talk to any of these people about my situation without the word getting out. My parents would've never forgiven me if I had mentioned my sister's episodes to anyone. As usual, I kept it to myself, and I realized for the first time that I had always been alone. Maybe not physically, but mentally, I had nobody I could rely upon or talk to about anything that mattered.

My parents would probably scoff if they heard me say that. Of course I could've talked to them because they love me. They do love me, but they let my homicidal sister live in the same house as us for almost an entire year. Instead of kicking her out, they made me lock my doors at night, and they hid the carving knives in the bottom of their closet during the night. Their love for my sister blinded them to the fact that she was a danger to all of us, and it caused me to fear what else it could blind them to. I couldn't trust them to keep me safe anymore.

When I graduated in 2018 from high school and moved in to the dorms at the University of Missouri, I was still scared that my sister would harm my parents while I was away. I was mostly relieved though, not only to be on my own, but to be away from her and the constant discussion of what new drama my sister had caused that week. It was so freeing to not have to be part of the family conversation every day. I went from calling my parents every day to maybe calling them once a week.

I had a slight mental breakdown in 2019 that lead to me failing out of college. I was living in an apartment for the first time, and balancing school and working full-time hours every just to pay rent was too much for me to handle. My depression and anxiety were very bad during this period of time. When I failed out of college, it was almost a relief, because then I could focus solely on work, paying my rent, and surviving. It really surprised my parents that, when my lease ended for that apartment, I signed the lease for another apartment in the same city that I had gone to college at.

The truth is, I did it for me. The most selfish thing I have ever done was not move back home after I failed out of college. I promised that 18-year-old girl that she would never go back, and I intended on keeping that promise, if I could keep none of the others to myself. My parents were upset, and my other family members tried to explain to me that it didn't make sense to not move back home. My sister even tried to convince me, which still bewilders me because she is the reason I didn't.

I spent a lot of my life having others treat me differently because of things my sister said or because of the things I couldn't say. There were so many times that it really seemed like how I felt or what I thought didn't matter. That I didn't matter.

It took moving away and finally being able to talk about these things to other people that I began to think that maybe I did matter after all. Maybe I had a voice and I didn't have to hide the way I felt anymore. Maybe I was finally safe.

Now, I have a great relationship with my boyfriend. I have friends at my job and friends I made at college. I have my own apartment. I'm finally happy with myself and the direction that my life is heading.

After everything that I was put through, I think being selfish for once was the best decision I ever made.