I’m not crazy, but my sister is

I’ve been looking over the course of the last year, and I see where I have improved and where I haven’t improved and, in some cases, might have gotten worse. Trying to gauge and monitor your mental health is always difficult.

I asked LawyerBoy last night if I’ve gone crazy. He knew me before everything went down. Before the diagnosis, before the big girl voice, before the soundproof room, before the video, before the apocalypse. He told me no, I hadn’t. He said I’ve just been through a lot, and I am handling it as well as anyone else would. He said it was a valid reaction, if not a little crass and overzealous.

Then he said something not many say to me: “You’re not crazy.” He said I shouldn’t trust anything that {D} or Brian 2 had ever said to me. He said they had been trying to control me and hurt me. It was a control thing, and I need to stop letting them have control of me now.

I’m not crazy, I’m traumatized.

My trauma runs deep, and I don’t react like the average person would. That’s my limitation. I try to be cognizant of that limitation and stop myself before I take action and ask myself, “Is this a proper reaction, or is this my trauma reaction?” I don’t always get the answer correct, but I’m trying.

I see the improvements in being able to pull back. I see where this medium has helped me logic through some reactions. Putting the logic out there publicly while trying not to be arrested or institutionalized makes you rethink—except the footnote thing. My bad on that one.

I have gotten worse in some ways as well. I’m not taking care of myself. It’s been five days since I showered. I just took the trash out for the first time in two weeks. It was the three bags of trash I pulled off my bed today because I no longer had space for me. While my home, in general, is significantly better and less like an episode of Hoarders, I still struggle with the will or just having the self-worth to not live amongst fast food wrappers.

The hoarding is the weirdest part and something I really need to work on. It’s not laziness—it’s will, I suppose. For instance, if I am laying down and I think I need to take my meds, it’s actually a huge struggle in my mind where I have to talk myself into sitting up and taking my meds, which I keep within reach, because getting out of bed to take them? I would never take them. I have literally laid in bed and said out loud, “What the fuck is wrong with you? They are right there. Take your meds. Get up!”

And that seems bizarre to me, let alone anyone else. I guess you had to be there to really get it, but I still don’t get it, and therapy is more focused on trauma right now.

I will say that I’m not living in the trauma as much as I was. I have a little more control over all of it. I don’t get stuck in flashbacks as often, I’ve noticed recently. It would be from not working and seeing names and numbers that remind me of people. But I see a small improvement.

The nightmares are worse. I wake up screaming his name. I wake up punching. I don’t generally remember the dream, but when I wake up, it’s bad. Maybe that PTSD has shifted to the subconscious and is trying to deal with it in my REM sleep now. Actually, I think that is how that is supposed to work. I need to look that up.

Well, crazy or not, I start my new job tomorrow, so let’s see how I fuck that up, shall we?

Now I’ll end with a stupid story that makes me feel superior in the sanity category. My sister is crazier than I am. This has always been truth. She gets delusional—we have different dads—and her diagnosis is a little more complicated than my major depressive disorder and the joint childhood trauma she and I share.

But this story is just fucking stupid.

My sister lost her car keys and wallet while she was in Denver, which is a couple hours’ drive from where she lives. She didn’t know what to do. So this turns into a fucking fiasco that takes two weeks, $1,000, and a car dealership to get her car back. My mom paid for everything.

Now we have the issue of her debit card. She was waiting on her new card and kept asking my mom to Apple Pay her and Zelle back. It was all stupidly complicated. And I am not involved because my sister and I don’t get along.

So I get a text yesterday asking me to Apple Pay her $50 and she would Zelle me. And I’m like, first of all, go to your virtual card on your banking app and use it. She said her bank doesn’t have that. Okay, so I’m like, okay, Zelle me. Zelle never comes. My mom calls me sobbing because this is all overwhelming to her and something about her Apple Pay having a card on it she didn’t recognize. I am, at this point, very disappointed in myself for not maintaining boundaries where these people can’t pull me into their fucking self-created drama. That said, my mom asks me to send my sister the money, and she will pay me. I agree. And I kind of offhand say, “It’s been weeks, why haven’t they mailed her card yet?” And my mom tells me she never ordered a new card because of some reason and she just keeps turning the card on and off.

What? Why? Huh? What?

And now I’m like, this bitch has my mom in tears, has me involved in this shit because she can’t order a new card because she lost hers. A normal fucking human would have taken care of that while waiting for a ride back home from Denver.

So I send her the money and tell her to stop making her fuck-up everyone else’s problem. She gets mad at me and goes psycho, and there is a reason the last time I saw my sister she had two black eyes and a broken nose (I only get physical with my sister).

All day she has been calling me. It’s been constant. She’s screaming at me in my voicemail because how dare I say that to her and I don’t understand. Yeah, I don’t understand. Nor does anyone else.

So there’s my excitement for the day. It could be worse—I could be like her.