Fourteen

One minute you're 27 and just trying to pull your shit together, the next you're 14 and crying in the shower. Wishing everything would just stop.

When I was 13 I got involved with a boy online. He was a few years older than me. He also got involved with several of my friends. Stand up bloke for sure. One of the usual markers of a toxic dynamic, he was expressing suicidality. Now, at 13 years old this actually wasn't an unfamiliar thing for me. Several of my friends had been self harming for years, some had gone further, and I had experienced my first suicidal thought when I was 11. So, this boy clearly had some issues and was not a mentally stable person, however, I don't think he was truly suicidal. I think he craved attention, he was probably lonely. But so was I. And as I am coming to understand, the only time I truly feel worth shit, is when I can be something for someone else. We were a match made in Hell. I don't feel like elaborating on that relationship any further, it's not worth the time. And honestly, it's not the relationship that caused me the most suffering from these years. And it's certainly not why 14 is the age I dissociate to when everything comes crashing down around me. That would be thanks to my sister.

She was, I don't know, disastrously insecure. And she took that out on everyone and everything around her. She's not dead, in case you're curious about the past tense. She just won't ever be part of my life again. I don't know when her issues with me started, but when I turned 13 and gained a much larger friend group than she had ever had (full of paedophiles mind you, not a friend group any one should have idealised), she developed some kind of fixation I wouldn't begin to know how to describe. I introduced her to my friend group. My fucking mistake. She thought one of the guys we hung out with was the most attractive boy she'd seen, and I asked if she wanted to come meet him. I owe him an apology for that in all honesty. This was around the end of 2011. For the next few months she used grooming tactics on all of the friends around my age. Oh, and on me. But for most of them, they got the presents, the compliments, the quality time, without the exploitation. The screaming, the silent treatment, the privacy invasions, the guilt tripping, the violent explosions she expressed when she didn't get her way. When I made a joke she didn't like. When I wanted to spend time with someone else. This was my daily life. Walking on eggshells around this minefield for 5 years.

She knew about the boy online. Knew that he was involved with multiple girls, me and one other he particularly favoured. She threatened to report him, I still have the messages. I begged her not to, not even for me, but for the other girl. She was going through Hell, had been for years, and seemed to just keep getting worse. I was scared of what would happen if she lost him. Remember, I'm 14 years old at this point in time, and I'm doing my best to navigate being deeply infatuated with a boy I'd never met, and my closest friends being in and out of hospital regularly for self-harm and suicide attempts. I didn't know what the right thing to do was, but as victims often do, I felt like I would be betraying him if I didn't try to stop her. And it worked, for a few weeks. Then one of my friends told her about something sexual in nature that had happened between me and him, and she told our mum. This sounds like the actions of a concerned sister, right? You'd think so initially. But she never told my mum about the other girl. And then she told her, and all of my other friends, that I was playing the victim. That I had chosen to report him. Mm. It took me years to figure out how all of these lies happened and put the pieces together. Her and my friends - who I don't hold to the same standard as they were 12, 13, 14 years old - whereas she was 17 at this point - had so much bullshit to say about me that it warped my memory of the whole time period. It wasn't until years later I examined all the pieces of information I still had access to that I realised just how much had been lied about. I reread several message logs, looked at friends' tumblr posts from the time period, pieced together the events bit by bit. Then I spoke to some friends I'd stayed in touch with.

"I remember when she was force feeding you ice-cream"

What the fuck?

I didn't even know what she meant. "What?" My voice was shaky and a feeling I couldn't quite put into words came into me. She had been trying to make me fat.

What the fuck?

At this time, while I was grounded, for my own safety. A nickname developed for me, 'Cakey'. I didn't know where it came from, I had been a little chubby, sure, I liked sweets, but to any extent that it warranted a nickname? I didn't get it. She bought me sweets, ice-cream, comfort food, while I spent most of this time in bed, sad, lonely. She had been doing this for months. But when I was grounded, I didn't know what was going on in the friend group. I didn't have access to the internet any more. She was telling them all she was going to make me fat. She always had issues with her own body. But what the fuck? What kind of weird fucking shit is this? And the best part is that she would use bringing me sweets as a way to spend time with me, or to guilt me if I didn't. When she finally cracked years later because everyone was finally starting to see through her bullshit, she even wrote, 'She bought you sweets, even when she couldn't buy them for herself' as one of the wonderful things she did for me. Because I was just so horrible for asking her to stop treating me, my mum, my brother, and our home, like shit.

I also found out that she had a photo album on Facebook that had been hidden from me. It was all unflattering photos and videos of me. And she gave out my social media passwords. Went through my text messages, with my friends. Anything to humiliate me, it seemed. I found most of this out when I was around 22. I hadn't spoken to her in 4 years. Apart from once or twice I tried to contact her. To apologise. Because even now I can admit that I wasn't always the world's best sister. I was a kid. She was a tyrant. My mum wasn't around a lot to see it. I thought this is what sisters were like. This isn't what sisters are like. Once when I was 16 or 17, so she was 19/20, she brought me some food and asked to hang out with me. I told her she could but my boyfriend was going to call - sadly the same boy from earlier as the infatuation transcended not talking to him for 2 years and at 16 no one could stop me. When he called I said, "You can fuck off now" in a light-hearted tone. She started screaming at me and threw the bowl from her food at the wall behind my head, smashing it. This isn't what sisters are like.

Let's skip ahead to the cut off point. My brother had moved home, it had been just me and her for years. My mum was never around. Me and him developed a close relationship, we never had before and it was really nice. We had a lot of common interests, at the time we both particularly loved The Walking Dead. She did not. He looked after me, and I him, as we were both suffering with chronic fatigue, and definitely some mental health struggles. She hated this. But instead of, you know, coming in and saying "Do you think we could watch something we all enjoy? I'd like to spend time with you guys too," She would say "This again? It's terrible. The acting and the writing are awful." Instead of, "If you guys are too tired to cook, why don't I make us all something and we could eat together?" It was, "Pizza again?" In that judgemental tone we've all had from a grandparent or random old lady our parents know. She left dishes everywhere, it was my job to unstack and load the dishwasher, she would always leave her dishes even when it was empty. Or she would put them in without rinsing them at all. When the dishwasher broke it was us and our 'melted pizza cheese', even though we had been using the pizza boxes as plates. Yeah, neither of us were in a particularly good place. Nothing was ever her responsibility. She bullied our mum. She stole things she had given me whenever she decided I no longer deserved them. She made everyone feel like they couldn't breathe around her because if they did it was in effort to torture her. She called my severe OCD 'germaphobia', and yelled at me when my compulsions bothered her. God forbid anyone get upset when she was in the bath for 5 hours at a time though. She wanted to control me. And when my brother came home he gave me the genuine support that I needed, without the consequences if I didn't live up to some unspoken expectations in return.

I told her I didn't respect her, because she didn't treat anyone of anything with a grain of respect. I told her I felt that she needed to be assessed by a psychiatrist, because the way she treated people wasn't normal. I wanted to give her an excuse. She thinks this was some kind of belittlement. It wasn't meant to be. It was the only reason for her behaviour I could think of that might make her not just a horrible person. We spoke to my mum about the situation, a lot. She didn't help much. She wouldn't kick her out of the family home, and she was 21 now, so she couldn't exactly be grounded or have the TV taken away. So we came to the conclusion she shouldn't have the private bedroom. Me and her had shared a bedroom for years, until she pressured my mum into letting her have her room, because she was rarely home. Mum had been thinking about giving the room to me. I wasn't an asshole. I didn't send her huge manipulative messages about how awful she was. I didn't scream at everyone. I did my chores. So I was to get the room now. Mum didn't want to speak to her about it, she said swap them around while she's at college. I told her I didn't think that was a good idea. It wasn't up to me.

So we swapped the rooms around. She came home. "Did mum say you could do this?" "Yes." I said to my other siblings, "I don't feel like I've been heard". She heard "I don't feel like she's hurt." Then she left. She began texting everyone about how she had paid for the linoleum flooring and it had to be taken up as I had, accidentally, ripped the floor in her other room and it 'made her feel sick'. I apologised immediately when this happened, and it had been my bedroom at the time. We did what she wanted anyway, my siblings offered to pay for me to get new flooring. Then we saw the black mould. Covering the floor around the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. Under the bathtub looked like the upside down from Stranger Things. I had been really sick for a few weeks at this point, coughing nonstop. So, we assumed this was likely the cause. The entire bathroom floor was rotting away. We made a plan to stay with my oldest sister, turned off the water at the house, and texted her to tell her what had happened, sending photos for proof. She didn't respond. We didn't know where she was, and she couldn't get into the house. We were worried she was going to be found in a ditch. I often worried about her killing herself, because her behaviour was so erratic, I would listen at the bathroom door to hear her move to know she hadn't drowned herself. She wouldn't answer if I asked her to let me know she was okay. I also asked my brother to hide the pills from the medicine cupboard once when I wasn't home because I was scared for her. So we went out looking for her. Nothing. Our oldest sister called the police. Turned out, my mum knew where she was, we were all furious that she hadn't told us or the police, as she knew they'd been involved. And she gave her a key to the house when she returned. She locked herself in. Wrote all over the bedroom walls, not in a manic disorganised way, as she even corrected her own exaggeration in one of the sentences. The statements were accusatory, we were all so horrible and she had been treated unfairly by all of us her entire life. I think she was scared shitless that I was finally standing up for myself. I think she hated that people were actually seeing her. The police had to threaten to break down the door before she let them in. They found a pile of pills in her room, along with crumbled up biscuits, a carton of milk, and my brother knife. It was a nice cooking knife with a wooden handle that she had been asked not to use as she would leave it in the basin and the handle was getting damaged. The police said they couldn't take her to a psychiatrist because she hadn't harmed herself or anyone else, and wasn't expressing that she would, but called for an emergency assessment. The only person she would go with was our sisters partner. He was frustrated but took her because everyone was seriously concerned. Furious, upset, but still concerned for her wellbeing and safety. She was just a bit anxious, the psychiatrist said. She wanted to apologise to us all when she got back. My brother and I weren't ready to speak to her.

I didn't hear from her for 8 years. Until last summer. The first time she came back to visit our family home for years. She didn't even visit when our mum was diagnosed with cancer. I walked in one day to her sitting in the kitchen, didn't realise who it was at first, accidentally made eye contact. "Hi," she said. As if it was fucking normal. I was polite. I don't cause issues. I know more about the shit she did to me than she has any awareness of. She's convinced herself it was us. We had been psychologically abusing her, intimidating her for "weeks". She put me through Hell for years. My reaction to her abuse of me, was not fucking abuse. She thinks I act nice to make myself feel better about the past. I do it so that she doesn't take it out on our mum. She thinks no one noticed her last summer, screaming at her on a regular basis. We fucking did. And I heard you screaming down the phone at your boyfriend too. You are an abuser.

She's on tiktok now. Lying about all of this. I've barely said a word about her publicly over the past 9 years. As if the past year wasn't hard enough on me, trying my best to navigate caring for two traumatised kids, developing chronic hives, looking after two unwell parents at different periods, having several mental breakdowns, having my OCD destroy my relationship, losing several close friends, all whilst dealing with severe pain and fatigue, dissociation, flat out fucking exhaustion. I don't care any more. I'm done with her bullshit. She might never see this. But I hope she does. I want her to know that I know exactly who she fucking is.

This isn't what sisters are like.