For the love of fucking God

So, venting.  First off, as always, if you're not up for someone venting, don't read this.  That helpful out is the only reason I feel at all comfortable venting on the blog to begin with.

So my sister just called up and basically pulled the Bene Gesserit litany of My Life Is Shit at me.  Now first off, the problems she has are entirely of her own making and not the unforeseeable kind where turning right instead of left destroys the universe.  No, of the "We all saw this coming which is why every fucking person on earth told you not to do that," kind.  And she still defends those monumentally stupid decisions, when she's not pulling My Life Is Shit she's talking about how good it was to make those decisions.  So you'll literally go from one day she's talking about how great and rosy everything is and how she was totally right to make the decisions she's made, and the next day she's talking about how everything's going to fall apart due to the consequences of those decisions.

Two things are worthy of note here.  One is that she never connects the fact that "Bad Thing A" is the result of "Decision to do thing that could only possibly result in Bad Thing A" there's no responsibility shown, which presents the disturbing truth that even when existential crisis of the moment is dealt with it's only a matter of time, usually not much, before the next one crops up because she refuses to stop making decisions that invariably result in: Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Thing the second is that, as near as I have been able to determine, as near as any doctor she's ever been to see has been able to determine, this is not the result of a mental condition.  She's not sick, she's just someone who does extremely ill advised things, gets brought down by the train wreck that inevitably follows, and via a refusal to take responsibility for her actions never stops doing extremely ill advised things.  Her responses to the situations she gets herself stuck in are actually perfectly healthy and rational.  She should be stressed, she should be sad, she should be panicky.  Things are fucked up and these are appropriate responses.

And here's where I come in.  I'm her depressed brother, her beast of burden, her slave, her person to drive over then keep for as long as she wants to.  She denies that last part and I honestly don't know if she's lying to me or herself.  She edits her past and I don't know if it's her memory or her accounting of things that gets edited.  Sometimes she does it quickly.  (There was a time when, within seconds of putting a spatula down, she was vigorously claiming never to have been holding it in the first place.  The context of why whether she was holding the spatula mattered is not important, what's important is that we've always been at war with Eastasia.)  Sometimes it's slowly over years.  Sometimes you don't know the speed at which it happens because whatever it is doesn't get brought up for a long time and then when it does her accounting totally fails to resemble the truth and you have no idea what her accounting was in the time between.  Did it just change when she opened her mouth, did it change at the event, some random point in the middle?

My father has always been the same way.  The difference was one of power differentials.  He was big and a parent; we were small children.  When we disagreed with one of his edits we were LYING and if there was one thing he hated it was lying.  The screaming could scar you for life.  I know.  It did.

I used to think it didn't count as abuse because it was never physical.  We just grew up living in fear, that was all.  To call it abuse takes away from those who were really abused, I thought.  Now I know better.  Weird thing is, if anyone else had called something similar happening to them abuse I wouldn't have disputed it even when I was in full on denial that what happened to me was.

So my sister called up, sad, stressed, panicky.  Because her life is objectively shit.  Stupid things she's done have caused a train wreck that is currently going on in slow motion and if it can be solved all will be lost.

This is just what I need to be bombarded with.  I may be on medication that seems to be dealing with things for normal daily whatever, but I'm still person with the tendency toward life wrecking depression.  I'm the only one in my family in two generations to have that problem.  If my mother's mother were still alive she might understand, but then she might not as the type she had isn't either of the types I have.

So at some point I had to stop my sister and point out that telling me all of these things that risk forcing me into a crying ball on the floor wouldn't fucking help her any.  I didn't word it that harshly, I have to handle family members comparatively gently though by the end of the conversation things did get somewhat harsh.  I'll get to why in a moment, but first I want to get to why she was bombarding me with things guaranteed to bring me down but in no way capable of helping me to help her.

Apparently I'm now her unpaid therapist too.  It can help to talk to other people when you've got problems but picking your depressed relative to dump all of your doom and gloom on in hopes it will make you feel marginally better is NOT FUCKING COOL.

And that's what she did.  That's her explanation for why she was trying to lay all of her problems on my shoulders.

So then we finally get to the point, what can I do to help.  Does she make it easy for me to help?  No.  For fuck's sake it could have been easy, but (and I say this as someone who is going to be due for root canal one week from today) it more resembled anestheticless dentistry where somehow you have both all the work and all the pain.

There's only one thing I can do to help her.  I can go to her house and do manual labor.  That's it.  Meaning that the only thing I need to know to determine whether or not I can commit to helping her is when she's available to bring me over and back.

Now, there's a little bit more to the story than that.  See, before I said that I would do no more than two hours a day.  That was my ground rule, I stated it clearly and firmly.  Not once did I get to stop within two hours (she controls the transportation, I can't go home until she lets me) and at least once I was able to hear a conversation with someone else where she made clear what she thought "no more than two hours" meant when discussing how long she had me for.  (Three to four hours hopefully, definite minimum of two hours.)

Lately she's been better.  The last few times I've helped her she's been punctual and she's taken me home when she said she would.  But if we were arranging for more than one-off things then I wanted to restate the ground rules.  If I  commit to X amount of time I need to know that it's X amount of time not X+[whatever the fuck extra she thinks she can milk out of me].  Again, not worded that harshly.  The fact that she didn't stick with that in the past didn't come up until she pretended it didn't happen.

Remember what I said about not once having the two hour limit honored.  Well apparently none of those times I went over to help her happened because she has no idea what I'm talking about because that never happened and if it did happen then if I'd brought it up then maybe we could have- wait.  I did bring it up then.  Repeatedly.  Hell, that's a major part of the reason that I stopped regularly helping her before.  (The other major reason being that I have my own commitments.)

Except in her mind, apparently.

And apparently she didn't want to let this go until I gave into her gaslighting and agreed that there were five lights what happened had never happened.  Finally I got her move on to the next part.  It was like prying a drowning person's fingers of the buoy keeping them afloat.

Once the ground rule of X time really means X time is established then the only thing that matters is when is this X time taking place and what is X.

Which is to say that I need her schedule.  Did she give it to me?  No.  Not at first at least.  Or at second.  Or at third.  I lost fucking count of how many times I had to ask.  Eventually it came out she is free after noon on  the next two days and any time for several days after that.  How hard is that to say?  Pretty fucking hard apparently.  She flat out refused to tell me over and over and over again.

I'm going to help her.  I'm going to help her because she's my sister, and the mother of my nephew, and the caretaker of my grandparent's farm.  I'm going to help her because the train wreck she's set up this time is massive and if something isn't done to avert it everything will come crashing down and hope and joy will be banished from the world (or at least my portion of it.)  I'm going to help her because I'm the kind of person who does that.  But sweet fucking Christ does she make it difficult to help her.

If she manages to push me into a nervous breakdown, which she has come close to more times than I can count or remember and pulled off at least once, then I can't help her.  If she won't tell me when it's possible to help her, then I can't help her.  She's like a doctor who says, "Let's schedule your next appointment.  I've got a few openings."  Pause.  "No, I'm not going to tell you when the openings are." Pause.  "Are you nuts?*  Why would I tell you when I'm available?"

I'm not going to help her on root canal day, I've decided that much already.  Safe bet that root canal day will be the brightest, most happy day in my near future.

Oh, and thank whatever gods may be for antidepressants.  Given how I'm feeling right now with medication propping me up, it's a safe bet I'd be a non-functional quivering mass if I weren't medicated at the moment.

So, yeah.  That's what I just got off the phone with.  For the love of fucking god.

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* Talking with her often has her using tone of voice and similar means to indicate that you're crazy.  Not, "mentally ill," that's too kind and clinical a term.  It needs to be disparaging and insulting to get across the force of it.