i can’t safely vent anywhere else and my 2 friends are asleep so fuck it, venting into the void time
tl;dr: my sister and i have a bad relationship and i want to get along with her but my mental illnesses and her mental illnesses make it extremely difficult and i feel horrible about it all.
my sister dropped by tonight and i had very little warning, and i especially didn’t realize she’d be spending the night (i work overnight and am nocturnal and she doesn’t work right now so her sleep schedule is Random). i have a bunch of shit to do around the house that I can’t make myself do most of the time because i’m a shambling homonculus of poorly treated mental illness. i’ve been lowkey stressed all year because it’s 2020 and i’m a leftist in america, watching the nation fall to fascism while society crumbles and civilians die and science is mocked, unable to see my friends in person, all within a year of our dad passing away, and with a 15 year old dog who means everything to me who i may lose at any point, because age be like that sometimes. i live with my authoritarian mother and can’t smoke weed (the only way i can actually relax), if i drink it has to be in secret, i can’t say anything political around her, and I can’t reveal anything about my sex life because i’m literally not allowed to have one. so to say i’m Always Stressed is an understatement. my only hobbies at this point are going to the vet for dog prescription refills or paranoid checkups, and distracting myself with internet and hulu because being alone with my own mind is too risky.
in addition, i grew up with bad social anxiety and, as i recently learned, am most likely autistic. it’s rare for me to spend time with someone without feeling on edge; it tends to be at least mildly stressful and i need some prep time to have plans or something, anything to fall back on so we’re not just sitting around awkwardly while they ask what i wanna do and i say i don’t know. obviously, the people i’ve gotten along best with are people who are cool with chilling, being in a room together without much engagement, and pointing at nearby animals as a form of bonding because look, there’s a bird, isn’t that great???
my sister is not like this. in many ways she takes after my mom; more extroverted than she realizes, focusing every conversation on her viewpoint, seemingly unable to hear and learn from other perspectives. in addition, she plays the victim pretty often, always using language that forces guilt onto everyone else and pushing people away if they don’t do what she wants (and then trying to guilt them back into her life).
so despite a relatively good relationship through large parts of our childhood/adolescence, the older we get, the less i can deal with her. my mental health is deteriorating, as is hers, and we have similar issues there, but she tends to want people around her, always doing stuff with her, hanging out all the time. she’s spent most of the plague lockdown with a guy she met online, so she’s barely been alone. she has roommates who get on her nerves but are also young and easier to relate to than, say, a republican boomer who goes to church every week and mostly talks now to other widows (which isn’t a bad thing, just not something i can relate to). she says she’s upset that she hasn’t been working because of covid, but has made very little effort, if any, to get another job because those Essential jobs are the kind she just… doesn’t do. so yes, she has problems and is allowed to want to hang out with her sister… but she doesn’t get that her sister is fucking Broken and Hanging Out isn’t the glue for me that it is for her.
my nights off are often my only chance to do chores and housework (doing so around my mom is frustrating as hell), plus i need that solitude as a break from the intense social anxiety. when she came over and i realized she was spending the night, i knew it’d end in a fight. she doesn’t say “what do you want to do” or accept if i say “nothing, let’s just hang out”. she asks repeatedly if i want to watch a movie (i almost never watch movies, i can’t explain it, i’m just not a movie person and don’t have much desire to watch them). if i walk into another room to eat a snack she starts checking in, often using a particular tone of voice that i recognize as “i want something”. she requires a level of patience and social energy I don’t have,and when i start getting flustered because i can never properly express “i don’t know what i want to do, and if i do anything i want to clean up my room or something boring that isn’t a shared activity, so if we could just hang out near each other that would be fine” when i start getting stressed. my language capabilities just… stop? when my anxiety is flaring up, especially when i’m talking out loud to a person. she jumps on the presence of stress in my voice, on uneasy tones, on the realization that i wasn’t ready for this, and immediately starts getting passive aggressive, guilting me for not wanting to hang out with her, telling me how hard her life is, invalidating my hesitations, etc. when i asked if she would want to do something different, like watch cartoons instead while i tried to get stuff done, she cut me off angrily and said no. she’s said things like “fine i get it i won’t ask anymore” multiple times and blamed me for not updating her on my work schedule or whatever, just making me feel worse and worse, but also more indignant because i had so little say in any of this.
she does this a lot, in many situations- she’s not a person who’s good at taking no for an answer, which is extremely worrying in terms of her need to always have a boyfriend because I have no idea how they’re being treated. it’s possible she mostly does this to me, because i was always a pushover and have only learned in recent years to try and express what’s really going on in my head (and also i have lost a lot of the patience i had before my life had fallen apart completely).
i want to hang out. i miss spending time with people. i wish i could just say yes and sit uncomfortably through a movie like a normal person probably would to keep a nicer relationship with my sister. but being pressured, being denied my own say, being expected to spend my first night off in almost a week how i wish to spend it, and being guilted for all of it, mixed with my weird, anxious, autistic brain’s need to blurt out true answers before the socially acceptable option even occurs to me, have made for ridiculous hurdles that i can no longer jump over. i want comfort. i want a voice. i want respect. and the people who allow me those privileges aren’t the people i’ve been able to keep in my life (my dad passed away and my friends are out of bounds because of covid). so constant frustration wears me down and then i argue with my sister because i’m too fucked to just say sure and watch a damn movie, and she’s too fucked to accept that people need to be able to say no, even to tiny, seemingly simple requests.
also my favorite holiday is this weekend and i can barely even care because i got scheduled to work despite asking off and have been dreading having to call and get my schedule fixed.
anyway that’s my night off so far. whee.
