I am so done with my sister

When I published my book in 2012, my older sister unfriended me on Facebook and cut ties with me, which I knew would happen. I hadn’t heard from her until my 50th birthday in 2020 when I noticed she had messaged me on my old Facebook account. I missed her happy birthday in 2019, but saw the one in 2020. I don’t know what made her message me. I would message her from that for the holidays and her birthday and she wished me a happy birthday this year on my birthday.

Every time I talk with her on Facebook messenger, I try to build a bridge. I tell her I love her and our younger sister and that I’m sorry about how things happened and I’m sorry about my book etc. And every time, she lights a match to burn that bridge before I have a chance to build the frame.

My sister makes me think she is right about everything and I don’t have all the right details. She made me doubt myself and took away my confidence our whole lives. But this time she said something to me that is so unforgivable and also she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know every detail about everything she wasn’t there to witness. And she told me I pulled things out of the air to write about in my book. This makes me wonder if she’s referring to things she doesn’t know about.

The unforgivable thing she told me was that my mom died because of me. My mom willed herself to die of a heart attack in her sleep because she didn’t want me to die from AIDS before she died because she didn’t want to bury her child. Here is what happened.

In 1991, I was diagnosed with HIV. I had asymptomatic HIV. For those who don’t know what that means, it means I had HIV, but no symptoms that would make me sick. I had no symptoms of AIDS. I made the mistake of telling my sister and I specifically told her “don’t tell mom”. Or anyone for that matter because that is something I need to tell people. It’s not for you to tell anyone. She didn’t waste any time telling our mother, and she told our mother I had AIDS.

My sister doesn’t know, and had absolutely no reason to know, but I talked to my mom every day before she died. She knew my HIV status, she knew everything that I knew because every time I went to the doctor, I told my mother what the doctor said about my health. My mom knew I didn’t have AIDS and she knew I would be healthy for a very long time. My sister didn’t know anything because I stopped trusting her when she told my mom something I asked her not to tell. I said that I didn’t actually have an AIDS diagnosis until a year after our mother died, and she said “that’s not how I remember it, but I won’t rehash that.” You won’t rehash what? Facts that you didn’t even know because you weren’t there?

My mother didn’t “will” herself to die at age 42. She died from a heart attack in her sleep. My mother was overweight like I am. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea at age 34 and they told me it’s genetic and that I could literally die from a heart attack in my sleep if I don’t have sleep therapy. So that tells me right there that my mother died from a heart attack in her sleep because she most likely had sleep apnea and didn’t know.

After this conversation with my sister, I can’t explain it, but I feel somewhat vindicated. My sister can pretend to know more than me, but I was there and she wasn’t. Things that happened to me happened TO ME and I remember them. She told me that I don’t remember things because I had seizures as a child. That doesn’t make me lose my memories lol.

Anyway, I downloaded all my messages from Facebook so I have a record of the things she has said to me, and I set that Facebook account for deletion. Deleting that old account where she messages me is a symbol of deleting her from my life effective immediately. I am so done with her. I feel free. I am free.

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What I did to you is nothing compared to what you did to me

A friend just posted this image on Facebook. If you have PTSD like I do, everything is a trigger for a memory, and this one is no different.

When I was 15 years old, we had to move in with some friends of my parents. They had been friends since the 70’s. I knew them when I was in elementary school. Over the years my mother told me that the woman, whom I named Bubbles in my book was a prostitute. Her husband was her pimp. This is what my mother told me, so when I was 15 years old when we moved in with them, I had preconceived notions about them as human beings. Bubbles tried to have sex with me when we moved in with them and I told her that I didn’t have any money. It was a jerk thing to say, but it was a jerk thing for a woman in her 50’s who knew me when I was a child to try to have sex with me.

So I don’t remember how much time had passed, but my step father had beaten my mother up to the degree that she went to the hospital and spent probably a month in a shelter for battered women and children, and her own children weren’t allowed to visit her. No one had any hard feelings toward my step father but me. When my mother came back, my step father had to leave. He moved in the trailer behind a mechanics garage. I don’t think it was too long before my sister kicked “Bubbles” out of her own house and moved in on her husband. My sister was 18, and this man was in his 50’s. Remember, we knew them when we were children, and she’s sleeping with him and making him kick out his own wife.

My mother, both sisters, Bubbles and I were all in the kitchen and my sister told us (my mother, sister and myself) that we had to leave. She was kicking us out of someone else’s house and my step father was moving back in the house. Really?

Before I get to the next part, I’d just like to remind you that when I was about 8 or 9, our parents would leave us alone in the apartment and my sister who was only 2 years older would babysit me. She began chasing me around the house with knives. KNIVES! They may have only been butter knives, but to a child, it doesn’t matter. To my little eyes, a knife is a knife is a knife. This wasn’t a one time thing, oh no, this was every time we were alone over a period of time. As soon as the front door would close and she knew they weren’t coming back, she would head to the kitchen and grab a knife and start chasing me, threatening to kill me. Again, it doesn’t matter that it was a butter knife, in my mind a knife is a knife and she was threatening to murder me, and she put me through so much hell. Imagine how tortured a child must feel knowing their own flesh and blood wants, well… blood.

When my sister kicked me, my baby sister and my mother who had just left a shelter for battered women out of the house, I looked at the butcher block in the middle of the kitchen and saw a butcher knife and those memories from my childhood of her chasing me with knives flashed into my head, so I grabbed that butcher knife and chased her with it. I was filled with rage, but obviously I hadn’t planned on hurting her, just scare her. She had just put a knife in all of our backs, so it was only fitting that she thought that she had one coming for her as well.

Years later, my sister told a friend of hers that when I was 15, I chased her with a butcher knife, and she told me that her friend thinks I’m a psycho. It’s funny how she told her friend how much of an angel she was and that out of nowhere I grabbed a butcher knife and chased her with it, but she failed to mention exactly what prompted me to pick up that butcher knife. I don’t normally go around chasing people with knives for no reason, especially butcher knives. I’m not a violent person, if anything I’m a pacifist. I’m sure she has been telling everyone she has ever met about that time that I, Mike the Psycho, chased my dear innocent angel of a sister for no apparent reason whatsoever with a butcher knife.

Look, I know it was wrong, but it was a reaction to how she was treating her own flesh and blood and how she was throwing other people’s relationship in the trash for her own selfish needs. I agree that it was wrong, I know that, and I own my mistake, but I guarantee you that she will never own her mistake. She has never apologized to me for anything that she has done to me, except for telling me that I was going to hell for being gay. That’s the only thing that she has ever apologized for, out of all the horrible things she has done to me in our childhood. And I guarantee you that she will never get an apology from me.

So yeah, I saw this image, and it flooded my head with all these memories. It doesn’t take much to trigger a memory. All it takes is an image, a sound, a smell, or even looking at an object and I’m back in the memory feeling the same emotions and I can’t stop thinking about it until I vent, like right now. And even after I vent, I may still be thinking about it and I’ll probably start talking to myself, or yelling at her in my head, and I’ll probably cry myself to sleep tonight because I can’t stop thinking about it.

My sister has all these people believing that I’m the bad guy, that I wasn’t abused as a child, I was the abuser. That’s what her friend said in his “review” of my book on Amazon. She fails to mention to him or anyone else all the rotten despicable things she did to me, and she will never own anything she has ever done to anyone else. I’m the “spoiled rotten brat who writes a book full of lies”, but my sister is a perfect angel who only tells the truth. Yeah right.

I’m getting off my soap box. I hope you don’t mind my venting, but what else is a blog for?

Sometimes you just need to cry

Writing “Diary of a Gay Nerd” helped me to release some, if not most of the horrible memories of my life, but it didn’t make them go away. The memories still haunt me. I feel so alone sometimes, especially when people tell me to just get over it. I’ve heard “Just get over it.” and “Stop living in the past.” Look, I spend most of my time living in the present and even looking forward to the future, but the past keeps creeping up on me and pulling me back. It’s not something I can control no matter how hard I try, and believe me, I have tried.

PTSD and Depression are a very real thing. You can suffer something traumatic and suffer through depression for a year, or perhaps it may take 10 years, maybe 20 or the rest of your life. I knew a woman who died in her 80’s and she was depressed her entire adult life after the death of her daughter. Depression doesn’t have a time limit. The only people who think that there is a time limit are people who have never been through something so traumatic that it put them into a deep depression.

I’ve tried talking with my family about the memories when I was younger, but all they did was talk about how funny the memories were for them. Like when I was 19 or 20 and my parents lived in Quartz Hill. We were talking about something that happened when I was 12 or 13 and my sister FINALLY admitted to purposefully getting me into trouble, and then laughing her ass off when I was getting the shit beat out of me for it. I knew then I couldn’t talk to my family without them finding it funny. It may have been funny to my sister to get me in trouble and then laugh while I was paying the price, but it was not funny to me then, it wasn’t funny at age 19 or 20, and it’s still not funny at age 44. In fact, as far as I am concerned, it will never be funny. The only thing my sister taught me was that I can never open up to her and talk about my feelings, because all she did was made fun of me.

I cry every now and then to let all the pain out and then I am good to go. Just like the picture says, “You can’t be strong all the time. Sometimes you just need to be alone and let your tears out.” You have to let all of your negative feelings out and you have to cry because if you don’t, if you just bottle all of your emotions every time, that bottle will get full and just like a Mentos being dropped into a bottle of Coca Cola, your emotions will burst out of the bottle like a rocket. Don’t let it get that far, just talk to someone and let out some of your emotions.

Do what I do, write a book, or write a blog. Even if no one reads it, it still lets some of those negative emotions out and releases the tension. If someone does read it, and they respond telling you they know how you feel, then you know you are not alone. And speaking of which, if you are reading this, just know that you are NOT alone. I am ALWAYS here if you need to talk.

Twitter – @DiaryofaGayNerd @xanapus

Facebook.com/DiaryofaGayNerd

No Apologies

When I began writing my book, it was not with the intentions of hurting anyone’s feelings. I dug deep down into my memories so I could write what happened to me in my life. It brought up so many bad feelings that I had at the time so when I wrote it, my feelings were hurt all over again. Even though I had forgiven people for what they said or did to me, I felt like I had to type the memories out as if I were still living the experience, as if my feelings were still hurt to convey how it made me feel because I didn’t want to sugar coat anything.

It took me years to write my book because I struggled with the consequences of writing it, like someone yelling at me and telling me that they never wanted to talk to me again or whatever, and today that happened. One particular family member emailed me saying I lied and didn’t mention things that I did mention and unfriended me on Facebook. Although my feelings were hurt that I was accused of lying, as always, but at the same time, this person has not been in my life for a very long time. She has chosen to distance herself from me because I don’t speak with other family members who she is closer to. I don’t know if that is the real reason for her distance, but as it is we haven’t spoken in a long time so what difference does it make if she no longer speaks to me now?

Look, I didn’t lie and I didn’t twist the truth in my book. It took me a long time to write it and I had to really pull out all of the memories with 100% accuracy which meant digging deep and rewriting as I could remember what really happened. My memories were twisted because I wasn’t sure of the chronology of the events, but getting down to it made me remember everything. It does hurt to be told that I did things that I never did and that I didn’t do things that I did, but that is what those certain people have been doing to me my whole life.

The person who has cut herself out of my life today has not read my book and that is obvious because she told me that I left things out that I clearly put in there. When she has read all 400 pages of my paper book, or 293 pages of my e-book then we’ll talk, but as far as I am concerned, she doesn’t know what she is talking about.

When I wrote my book I had to really think if this is what I wanted to do. I had to tell myself that once it was published I couldn’t take it back. I had to write something that I would never apologize for writing because I know it was true. The relationship will probably never be repaired, but it has been broken for too many years anyway so it was only a matter of time before it all fell to pieces. It’s too bad that it had to happen and I am not going to blame myself because I didn’t do anything wrong. I was the one who was mentally and physically abused, I was the one who was homeless and I was the one who was molested and raped. I wanted to tell my story so people would see that I was able to fix my life and I made it better.

I am not sorry and nobody can make me feel guilty about writing the truth.