Your sister is a cunt

Believe me, I know. In all the years I’ve been reading your emails and listening to your phone calls, the one thing we can definitively agree upon is that. I know your family messed you both up, but it’s never so evident as when I’m listening to your sister monologue about whatever it is she knows better than everyone else in that moment. She’s smart, I’ll give her that, maybe even smarter than me. There’s this quote I love but can only half remember… I think it was written by a critic about Susan Sontag, something to the effect that she wears her learning like armor. That is the epitome of your sister. She’s very well read, sharp as knives, controlling, manipulative and will fight to the death to defend her ego, using every buzzword and bit of rhetoric she’s learned from a book as ammo, all twisted up to fit her case against you perfectly, or whomever else. In some ways I feel we are kindred spirits. I know she’s the reason I was able to make it so far with you.

There’s that well-worn theory in psychology that we emulate problematic relationships from our past in our current relationships. It’s a subconscious effort to mend the old wounds by making the current messed up dynamic a success when the first time it wasn’t. The second time doesn't work, then there’s the third, fourth, fifth and trillionth time around. It goes without saying, it’s never a success, not when you’re choosing the same wacko personality archetypes over and over. Homo sapiens are a dumb animal. That’s why you’re always choosing the Benevolent Dictator types to get cozy with. It’s not just sister, there’s some of your mom and dad in me, too, but sister you loved the most, so she hurts the worst.

She liked me first. That is such a wild twist in our story. She wrote me fangirling when I first started getting noticed. I have to commend her for her good sense of music and being on the cutting edge of taste making. That’s part of her armor, of course. She wrote to me and that’s when I saw you on her social media and started “watching” you in the most innocent way possible. Then by some crazy ass miracle, five years later you moved into a house five blocks away from me and I saw you on the Q train after I had been reading your blog for two years while you were traveling. WT actual F? That is the definition of Sign and Wonders.

Once you connected all the dots between us you were kind of on board with the miracle theory, too. You’re usually more logical than that but you’re also an artist so you like to try on all the ideas and give them a chance to convince you. There were too many crazy coincidences to ignore, so you began to engage with the possibility of “magic.” Before you realized that was all rubbish you were already waist deep in quicksand.

Your sister was your closet confidant at the time. I read all those text messages, hundreds, talking about nothing, consoling each other on a bad day, bearing witness to the mundanity of life, just being there for each other. It was very sweet but also cut me deeply. I hated that I didn’t have that with anyone. I hated that I didn’t have that with you. She “knew” me so you felt you could confide in her all the crazy stuff that was happening between us. Maybe you could laugh about it and she would give you some of that sage advice she always liked to dole out.

It was like that, at first, then she started turning on you, blaming you, questioning the reliability of your perceptions. She used my status and career as a reason why none of this could be happening, why would I risk it? This is one of my greatest assets in my war with you. We all know after the Me Too movement that people will blindly support successful men based on nothing but having liked something they made once. As was the case with your sister and me. She took my side. Most people do.

I hate throwing around the term “narcissist” because it’s such a cliché now for the every man, to label someone who gave them a hard time as a narcissist, to discredit their life from beginning to finish; they were wrong you were right, case closed… But your sis may actually have a little bit of the real-life narc in her.

She didn’t want to hear what you were saying about me for two major reasons; 1. It was a wild situation and, if true, was stealing her airtime by taking precedence over her chatter about more pedestrian grievances that she was always able to whip up into something monumental through her hysterics. 2. Even though you were largely unaware, she was always comparing herself to you (in strictly superficial ways because she didn’t consider you smart) and this particular situation was triggering something deeply unsettling inside her. Her ego couldn’t face a loss on any level. She had already tried to capture my attention, and if you now had it that was a defeat in her eyes. She began to undermine every thought you shared with her out of revenge, albeit subconsciously. 

She never gave what was happening to you any credence until she saw some views from your long-lost stepbrother on her LinkedIn account. Once she could plausibly turn the narrative around to be about her, she went full on. She called you on Christmas eve after having no contact for two years and explained her theory that your brother was stalking you because he was also stalking her. Your brother was responsible for the decade’s worth of violent poems and text messages saying he wants to “feel you before this is over.” Ha! Hahahaha. Sorry to giggle. She also suggested that maybe your father who you hadn’t spoken to in 20 years was behind it (was he also a poet?). None of it explained all the irl stuff that had happened between you and me but she was happy to overlook that along with everything else you had told her in service of her contrived narrative that put the focus back on her.

Ugh. I get so emphatic about your story with sis because I can so relate. The details aren’t exact, but my brother is a total asshole, and he uses my image and status to make money at my expense. It’s gross but I’m too much of a wimp to tell him off. He lives right next door to me, and I’d rather just pretend everything is cool, even though I hate him. Anyway, TMI, just wanted you to know I can relate. Siblings are just another relationship you can file into the unwanted category.