u/Fun_Investigator1474

TRIGGER WARNING: multiple mentions of SA. Please don’t read if you think this might affect you negatively.

This is a rather long post, but I think it’s quite interesting. I’m writing this because I think these stories are important and I’ve never met anyone in a situation like mine/ how I grew up.

My sister has a pretty bad case of schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. Her symptoms only presented after she was SAd in college and no one supported her, including my parents. Before, she was the popular cheerleader with straight A’s, but after that point, she began to lose her mind. She confided in me, would tell me all of her delusions, and got me to believe some of them (i was 12). Among many of her delusions and hallucinations, every cop and fire truck was out to get her, every person she saw either morphed into a lion or a snake (i was a lion), and when she stared into the sun, it would “cause the apocalypse.” She used to make me sit in front of a white wall for hours at a time without talking or moving to practice seeing/reading my aura. She convinced me I could see them too. She convinced me that water is alive and that the water molecules get broken/“killed” in the pipes so you can only drink like fiji bottled water to get the “spiritual benefits” of water. At age 12, she forced me to vape for some reason and got me to smoke weed. At age 15, she gave me DMT off the dark web. The first time I hallucinated (age 13/14) was after my sister ran away. I went to the kitchen late at night and didn’t realize my mom was outside letting the dogs out. When my mom walked in the door, I saw my sisters face clear as day. I called out her name. My mom replied, “what? it’s me.” I blinked and there was my mother. A couple days later I swear I hallucinated a goose singing a Mac Demarco song to me. It was bizarre but that was the last time I hallucinated for a while and luckily, I stopped believing most of the delusions I got from her. But my sister got worse, there are too many stories to recall them all. I’ve had to pick her up at 4am after being told she is naked in an alley, she would see my parents as zombies and threatened to kill my mom, she came to me naked, hysterical, and scratching all over her body begging me had to put lotion on her body to “get the bugs off.” It was difficult. And my parents really didn’t help her at all. They would always make me be the one to help her because I was “so empathetic” and according to them was the only person who knew how to talk to her. They told me to get ready to deal with this “horrible burden” forever, they said, “our daughter is gone.” For this and many other reasons, my parents are a strange type of evil. Not only did that dehumanized my sister so much and made them not try as much to get her help, but it fucked with my head at 13 to be told that my “real” sister is “gone” and this new psychotic, burdensome sister was fully my responsibility.

Something that will plague me forever is what a nurse told my mother. Once, my sister ran away again to another state and ended up in a hospital. My mom had to pick her up and when she went, the nurse told my mom that my sister said our Dad had sexually abused her as a child and that she also told this to the people whose couch she was crashing on. I was 14 when I heard this. My mother told me that she was so out of it, there is no way it could be true. She said something along the lines of, “well, your sister also said she saw the cookie monster, so” and “she was trying to gain sympathy from the people who were housing her.” My father came to me sobbing saying “how could she say this? I would never do this.” Everyone thought that believing her was completely and totally out of the question. But would a woman who has been raped as an adult just lie and make an accusation like that? Honestly, I was young, depressed, and self-harming everyday, I just tried not to think about it for the longest time because I couldn’t handle it. As an adult, I think I believe her. My dad has been physically abusive to us, especially as children and has also cheated on my mother multiple times. Does that make him a PDFile? No, this is just all I have to go off of. And I will never know for sure because now, I can’t ask her about it. Now, she is barely able to have a basic conversation, maybe because of brain damage from drugs and sustained psychosis, maybe because of the array of medications my parents have her on for years. She’s under a conservatorship. Also, my parents wanted to give her electric shock therapy at one of the worst mental hospitals after not visiting her there once (I went once a week). I somehow convinced them not to do the ECT.

Then, when I was 16, I was SAd twice by my insanely manipulative best friend at the time (we are both women). My parents didn’t help me at all and never talked to me about it even though a social worker and investigator showed up at our house. The best friend had done this to other people. My other friends were concerned, but pretty much stopped talking to me after I told them what happened. With no one to turn to, I started to beg angels for help. Maybe it’s because my sister had also told me delusions about angels, maybe it’s because of the angel number craze that was happening at the time, maybe both. I think it was literally the next day that I started hearing voices that weren’t my own. I thought they were the angels and I saw orbs of light and white shadow figures almost every day after, assuming they were also the angels. I told a lot of people that I saw them because I thought I was “chosen,” even my parents. They did nothing. I drew them everywhere and saw repeating numbers all the time, but not just like 444, like 743, 532, and 423. I’d get really obsessive about it. When I would “meditate” and close my eyes, I would vividly see a big cosmic web and sometimes a giant white spider lady weaving the universe. Everyday, I would wake up at 4am, do yoga, meditate, listen to the angels, write a song (i’m a musician), journal, go to school, come home and repeat the meditate, listen to the angels, etc. Reading back those journal entries I wrote, none of it makes sense. It’s all disjointed and just genuinely insane. I thought I was some chosen being who could heal the world. I didn’t see any flaws in myself. I thought I was ascending into a new reality. Sometime, I felt like I was on acid or DMT with how active my brain was. I became obsessive about acquiring as much spiritual knowledge as possible which lead me down a several rabbit holes of kemetic spirituality, starseeds, reading Rumi over and over. I became so detached from reality and believed I was just a vessel for the universe that I hardly made any decisions because “the universe has my best interest at heart and would decide for me” I thought I was a conduit for what the universe wanted. I wrote this one song where one of the lyrics is “carve my body into a flute and give me song with your breath.” It’s basically praying that some entity or the universe will take over my body and live life for me. This all lasted for about a year and a half until I slowly started to come out of it, though I still had lingering delusions and habits like constantly saying under my breath, “I am loving awareness.” I wasn’t pulled the rest of the way out of it until meeting my now partner who is very blunt and autistic. When I told them my “beliefs” (delusions), they would disprove it all with logic, history, and relating my beliefs back to my trauma.

Later, at 19, I was in a severely abusive relationships which landed me in an out-patient program where I was diagnosed with bipolar with psychotic episodes/features and PTSD.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. More and more, I’m realizing that most of me and my sister’s symptoms would have been way less severe, or many may have been non-existent if we had supportive parents who weren’t abusive. I’m still getting used to calling them abusive. I’ve minimized it for so long because it’s not as bad as the other abuse I have endured. But logically, I know hitting your kids and finding out your kids have been raped and not caring is pretty abusive.

I have learned thousands of lessons through these experiences but most important, even though it might be obvious, is, the more you treat human beings as dignified individuals instead of as a burden, the more dignity and autonomy they gain within themselves. When you treat someone like a burden like my parents did, you force them to be dependent on you because you are the one shouting your standard of how a human should be.

What do you see in his eyes?

river spirits?

Growing up with a sister in psychosis who got me to believe her delusions and later experiencing psychosis myself (story time)

cursing my rapist/abuser