Take It or Leave It

Like ‘a bull in a China shop,’ smashing up all the cups and saucers - that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my sister being a Taurus. The next thing - a sensory vision of her standing close to me, kind of higher up by about half-a-face, puking all over me. It’s not physical vomit though, it’s yet another one of many emotional purges, where I am the bucket. Gross, projectile spewing at proximity, filling my whole being! And then, once the purge is complete, just as though nothing ever happened, relieved, she spins on her heels and bounces away, free as a bird.

But I, I feel sick. Yuck! Worthless. Weighed down and addled by all manner of despairing thoughts and feelings, scary confusion and paranoia. ‘Is it me. Am I really bad? Could I do anything differently?’ Dark, sticky, dense vibrations of pain, worn like the dutiful sister I was agreeing to be. For years I had received these deluges of emotional saturation. I loved my sister, and this was what I had thought I needed to do – to wear it for her, so she could feel received. This is how I could love her.

Or so I thought.

This is not actually how love bends or moves. This was a relationship of fear. Of separation and pain. Within it I had constantly wondered when the next extravagant inundation of dense emotional turmoil would berate me. I was crouched down inside myself, in the corner, in the shadows. My own little child self was scared that she was not important enough to reject her sister’s offerings – fearing that she herself would instantly be rejected and dismissed.

She did truly love her sister besides, and when she was amenable to it, they would play together. But always there was the undercurrent of anguish and that pressure, so my child self… she dared not speak. She would love the good and take the bad, and hope that her sister might feel less pain. Now I was grown, and so was she - well and truly adults, but those children still lived on inside us both, prompting cycles of fear within our relationships.

One day, finally, I had said “No! You can’t spit your venom at me, I won’t take it anymore!” The reality had been a little bit different to that, I had waved my hands above my head and made raucous sounds like a Wild Thing. I had come to a point in my own evolution where I recognised that letting other people, even beloved siblings, dump on me emotionally, was a major no-no. And so that day, when I had known what was coming, I had set in place a very clear intention in my mind.

When she lashed out at me, and prepared to dump on me, I would give back to her with the same intensity, volume and speed as my sister outputted. I would say, “This is not me! This is yours, and I’m not taking it anymore!” I would stand up for that crouched-down little-girl-self, hiding in the corner. I had grown excited and nervous as I played the scene out in my mind. My stomach flipped and dropped repeatedly as I rehearsed, steadied my feelings and sharpened my resolve.

I had not been real with my sister or myself all these years.

I owed it to us both to be authentic - a reclamation of parts of myself and an honest reflection for my sister! It didn’t matter to me what she had to say. It was all fabricated from long ago. She would, in reliable panache, insert me into her story of pain – whatever that was, and consequently justify the projectile-vomited reality that she was preparing to unleash. As she sent the preliminary death-vibes my way as a form of warning, she’d go very quiet, as was customary prior to an assault. A surly, grey energy would engulf her aura like a dark companion. She would avoid my eyes when she wasn’t boring through them and would dismiss all conversation save for mundane necessity.

I executed my plan to a tee! It couldn’t have gone better! When the pressure inside her gathered enough steam, she was only then ready to settle her eyes on me and press the release valve. As though she had been levelling her story of pain to meet the eventuality that was to unfold, my sister had accused me of stealing her most precious and prayed over water vessels. ‘Whaaaat!?’ I had reflected my truth gallantly, “I am not what you say! I have taken nothing!” Refusing to cower and plead, not even within the energy - being able to discern, gave me so much pleasure, pleasure I had not been able to fathom prior to those moments. There was such an ease to it - letting go of an oppression that had ridden me my entire life. ‘It could be gone just like that!?!’

There was no precedent informing my sister about what was next - how to recover from this new variant-sister. She either stepped up and met me or not. She chose not. She wasn’t ready to be real. I bounced it all back to her. I did not take on the hatred of a snarling, snivelling thief. This continued to shock and displease her. Whatever was creating the explosive anger inside her, she was not yet ready face it, not even via the projections of it thrown onto the world around her. Her only sense of power remained in the delusional essence of the make-believed wrongs done against her. There was nothing I could have said to placate or come back from this most heinous of fictitious crimes.

Predicting this, I had been ready. I had waved my arms above my head erratically, throwing in brief, spirited bursts of jumping jacks, to keep the energy high. I rebuked her scandalous incriminations with gibberish to match her sonic outbursts and by mimicking the shrill, the drilling, and the chaotic-spittle-driven-shrieks of my sister’s barbarity.

There was no turning back.

She had been stopped in her tracks, momentarily dumbstruck, mouth agape, eyes wide; then she had narrowed them. She had been readying herself for round two! I came back in response with wind-milling and flailing arms, and shaking body, assisted by gnarling and gnashing of my teeth. I intersected these motions with bulbous, popping eyeballs, while omitting loud siren squeals, pointed in her direction – specifically catered to drown out her yelling.

As you may be able to imagine, this all took a good amount of effort to accomplish. These behaviours were designed with the very specific purpose of dispelling and reflecting, rather than absorbing and taking on my sister’s offerings. There required adequate reflections of the same value to show her how it felt, and that they were not mine, but were her own emotions/energies. These needed to be articulated in a way so that they were powerful enough to disrupt, but not be lived as true through the emotional body - that is why I had incorporated silliness. Arguing with my sister would have achieved nothing!

She stopped again at a loss as to what to do. She was so used to getting her way; the ol’ dump and retreat had worked every time. Her eyes shone and danced as she assessed what was happening, part of her appearing quite delighted in the unusual change of script. There was a slight smile at the corners of her mouth, but she caught it, gripped onto it, and twisted it back down into a disapproving snarl. She narrowed her bright eyes once more into dark narrow slits.

Attempt three was under way.

I took several deep breaths while she began to surge up, preparing to unleash; building momentum, gaining volume and conviction. I wasn’t hearing any words though; I was attuning to frequencies. I had stared past her eyes into the seat of her soul, my intention, ‘see yourself my sister. This is in you.’ I felt something for my sister that no one ever wants to bestow upon or receive from another human being; pity - for so desperately vying for me to take on her shit. She must have been in a lot of pain! My whole life I had felt so afraid of my sister blowing up! I'd steadied myself so as not to back down. I didn't want to hurt her. ‘It isn’t mine.’ I had reminded myself. ‘These images of me are not true images of me, I let them go.’ And so I did. I dumped all the fetid, putrid shame; the lifetime of torment, and in my monkeying ways, those emotional-mental templates of 'me' were shucked from my core. Phew!

I used my breath to heave and dangle and hiss like the Wild Thing I saw in my sister. She wasn’t so scary now. I had allowed myself to be my - actual-fully-expressed-in-joy-self, even within this bizarre, potentially doom-inducing scenario. As I extended up through my spine, I took her in, still mid-rant; my dear sister, with all that swirled around and through her. I breathed in and out and felt a profundity from deep within my soul as I continued to release all projections from our relationship that were untrue. A flush of warmth surged throughout my body, and I felt the little girl inside me grow, until she was filling out the hollow places within, and we were merged.

“NO FUCKING THANK YOU!” I screamed at my sister as she got louder. And then it was over. I don’t remember the exact moment, but she seemed to drop down half a head in height, to back away, until she was yelling, while walking in the other direction. What a relief! I had truly believed that my sister would embrace me as my authentic self, over her make-believe machinations of a sister, and the phoney, placating version of a sister I had been reducing myself to.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My sister was unprepared to give these other versions of 'sister' away. She was far from being able to embrace me in my simplicity, in my tenderness and in my maturity. So much pressure was released for her by offloading onto these truncated versions of ‘me.’ I was so grateful for finally deciding that I was worthwhile enough to ask for the love I so desired and deserved, from within myself, and to take the actions necessary for that love to be expressed. My sister had a part to play in that too, and I thank her for that hard won lesson.

I hope that one day my sister will be brave enough to meet all of the parts of herself, and to see the beauty in me too.