❤️‍🩹 Sibling dynamics ❤️‍🩹

i love you but it's complicated ✿𑁍❀

Hi crush 🌻

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of DMs from people asking for advice or thoughts on certain topics, which I personally ADORE (message me any time) and this week I thought I’d write my response here.

Since this one’s come through I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, which often means it’s difficult and the thing you should write about most.

Can you write about complicated relationships with a sibling? The good, sure, but the bad, too.

It’s probably the most personal thing I’ve written here and something I’ve never really spoken about. I hope, if it resonates, it makes you feel a little less alone in the world.

cute pic of my sis, but this newsy’s about brothers

Can you write about complicated relationships with a sibling? The good, sure, but the bad, too.

My brother is two years older than me. He’s tall, athletic, very funny, probably votes National and goes hunting in the bush. Our age gap means, hypothetically, we’re running a baton relay of a life together:

He grows out of something just as I grow into it (Hawaiian shirts from Hallensteins, zip off utility pants). He finishes an era as I begin (first crush, leaving home). What he becomes too big for (polarfleeces, small towns), I’m usually growing into. We lived together with our parents and sister until he was 18 and moved to Australia. We’ve never been in such close proximity again.

I’ve wondered my whole life about our relationship. More specifically, whether the next part of this story is mine to tell. Mental health and family are such private, intricate things, and I feel really serious about never wanting anything I write to make someone feel uncomfortable or exposed in any way. But the more I thought about this, the more I felt like sharing the complicated stories of our lives is one of the true tonics of getting through it. Don’t you think?

Complicated love

When he was 15 and I was 13, my brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. We were staying at a campground for Christmas, and his episode came in a violent rush no one saw coming that changed absolutely everything that came after it.

What followed was two bleak years of my family shut away, trying to keep each other alive and trying to understand this dark, unpredictable energy living inside this boy we loved but seemed to defy everything we knew about how to live: that hard work would be rewarded. That things would always get better. That difficult times would always end. That things would be able to be made sense of.

In turn, we came to learn the very opposite.

While he withdrew during this time to get better, I got good at being alone and doing all those coping things: becoming a nerd at school, sitting up late trying to learn how to read poetry and shaping my childhood self without him. It was a strange, heady time that always had a gap in it. Like a school photograph with the person sitting next to you cut out or a story about a ghost. When he finally emerged, somewhat level again, the two years, two months, two weeks and two days between us were no longer numbers but a giant chasm. I’d gotten to have a teenage life. He’d been robbed of his.

As I grew up and time moved on, and the sharp peaks and troughs continued to ripple through, I kept trying to comprehend it. When I was 23, I had a tiny poetry book about my life published, and in a bid to try and make sense of it and us, I wrote about it there:

Despite all the ache, there were good times, too. He could drive me through any part of the country and know why the rivers bent the precise way they did, which fish swam in which waters and how the tide worked. He’d play me Rage Against The Machine and 50 Cent as a cultural induction into my teens and do those generic brother pranks like pouring salt in my Milo instead of sugar or changing the settings on my alarm clock so I slept in.

There aren’t as many of these anecdotes as I’d like or as many as I feel entitled to, but they still happened — they’re still there. I feel their absence the most at dinner tables with other families or at weddings when the siblings get up to speak, thinking:

What would you even say? Do you even know me at all?

Understanding mental health means understanding another planet entirely. And most of all, knowing that not everyone knows about it.

There have been major moments in my life I’ve wondered where the hell he is. Birthdays. Sports games. Meeting crack-up celebrities I know he’d like. Big news about my work and relationships and the disasters and triumphs of his own life I haven’t been a part of. He’s busy being him, and instead of feeling guilty about it, I have to just go on and keep being me. If you’re not careful it can be a dangerous guilty feeling.

What’s come out of this strained relationship is a kind of complicated love that doesn’t fit the traditional way we’re meant to think about our siblings. We’re told it’s meant to be this boundless, abundant thing, but I’m not so sure.

My brother says he loves me (or others say he does), but I know he doesn’t in that heart-beating way. Not really. He loves me in the way things that simply just co-exist do. Like helixes on a DNA structure or two opposite sides of a magnet. They’re there because they were invented that way. But they’re not choosing to be. It’s a painful but profound gift you have to work out what to do with.

So, to the curious person who asked me this question, I think there are two dimensions to sibling love: the first part is loving them through circumstance (the fact that you were born connected), and then the second is the active part. The choosing to love them. This one’s not a given, and like romantic love, takes work.

My advice to you, if you’ve experienced any of the above is this: Love someone until it reaches the walls. Turn up often and prove that you’re good, non-judging and able to listen. But know when to stop. Accept that, like everything, love has its limits. Don’t be apologetic about your own happiness. Be brave enough to go away and find closeness in other safe places. Love people as well as you can, and don’t forget about yourself in the process.

I love you. Thanks for being here.

Bel

If you wanna submit a question/feeling/existentialism, you can DM me on Insta here. I j’adore all your messages.

PS. After writing this, I realised coincidentally that it’s Mental Health Awareness Week in Aotearoa atm. If you’re struggling with how you’re feeling, please reach out to someone who understands you and seek professional help if you need it. You’re never as alone as you think <3