👧🏼 Sasha In The Spring Of My Life
First Draft Created: 2024-03-25 18:45
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Written on the theme of spring.
A.k.a: "Autistic Rage"
It is autumn now, although I can't help but think of spring, and the metaphor is not lost on me, as so many of the days of my life which were supposed to be the best, my youngest, are behind me, many lost to the cult and to living as less than me, perhaps even as someone else.
"Autumn" is also how my other sister Adrielle, painted me. She'd painted stylised, regency-era paintings, one of each of us three siblings - her, Sasha and myself, all in different seasons, out in nature. My season had been autumn, just as an image consultant had once told me I was an "autumn". Adrielle's had been winter. Sasha's had been spring.
Perhaps the notion of it being "Autumn" of my life now is a bit morbid, even for me, lately, and I certainly hope premature, given I am only mid-thirties, but I am talking about more than physical years.
Also, people like me often tend to live shorter lives, for one reason or another - whether cast out by family or society, and you have to be immensely strong and resilient, capable of holding on through all the depressive and hopeless situations you see, and surrounded by strong and resilient people who do the same, to survive.
Even then, it's uncertain WHERE you'll be surviving. On someone's couch, surfing from couch to couch. On the street, if you lose your home in Cape Town rain-pouring winters. In a concentration camp, if you were born in the wrong country or at the wrong time.
Or you may not survive, whether by your own hand or someone else's: in many countries and scenarios, annihilation of you and people like you was a damn near certainty.
This was the sentiment my dark mind held onto right now, as I was asked to write on the theme of spring, fittingly in the season, my season of autumn, and fearing the winter to come.
Thinking of spring and what I had before I came out and before my transition - though I wouldn't take it back for the world - I miss her, my seven-years-younger youngest sister Sasha, and too many things seem to be reminding me of her.
Even a thimble, in my darning kit, which reminds me of how she always loved and likely still loves to sew.
She sewed everything. As a teenager, she sewed her own fashion items, wanted to start a shop with her own designed clothing. She even told me the label name she would use. I am sorry that I cannot share it, as I have yet to receive her permission, though now I am not sure I ever will.
I remember how we would go shopping - carefree young teens, slightly less carefree as I grew into an older teen and then my twenties, and she too felt the strain from my parents, our changed lives as expectations of who and what we would be in a merciless evangelical cult clashed with what we felt inside, who we were and what we believed, in many ways.
The last time we talked, I had trauma-dumped. Was that a year and a half ago? I believe she had blocked me since then. Ironic, since she was the only family member whom I had not blocked. I guess, opening up about how gutted I'd felt at my mother's response to my desperate cry for help, I had not given consideration to my little sister, to how difficult all of this may be for her, as essentially the one in the middle.
Though my relationship with my parents and likely my other sister was irreparable, she likely still felt the pressure to be the peacemaker in some way - which she knew I would not tolerate, so instead she had to listen, to absorb, and likely, to fear.
My sadness and grief at losing my parents while they were still alive was likely overwhelming, almost certainly. I cannot think of any other reason for her to have blocked me. Perhaps my expression of the unfairness and utter lack of care from my mother simply resembled rage, and that was something I had to learn.
My sister Sasha faced a lot of trauma growing up. She was the baby of the family. Her role was unique, in that she did this while mediating and caring for others, and in hindsight, I think my mother had used her as a therapist, her sounding board and as her own parent far more than the rest of us, as Sasha was the gentlest and most empathetic listener. She, always she, was also the little one, the one trying to survive our ire, in our toxic family growing up.
My parents' fighting. Adrielle and me fighting. My parents, both employing different types of cruelty when they needed an outlet at any of us children. Adrielle being cruel to her as a teenager, in her twenties and likely still.
And, when I was a child and teen, me with my undiagnosed autistic 'rage' when I encountered sensory overload, gleefully goaded on by my parents, which would manifest explosively towards both of my younger sisters and result in my parents being able to punish me in turn with physical violence.
There are some things I can never forgive myself for when I acted out, even though what they had called my "temper" somehow miraculously went away completely when I had my own room and my mind was no longer overrun with sensory overwhelm and cruel taunting.
There are things I can never take back, and I did them deliberately, KNOWING I could never take them back, because I wanted to hurt everybody, but to hurt myself most of all, leave scars on my body and psyche so that I would never, never forget, never feel better, never forgive, never let go, so that the permanence and the scarring would be a reminder that it happened, that it mattered, that the emotional pain which had pushed me to feel I was breaking was real, was physical and to never, ever trust, be so weak, be so vulnerable, in order to let it happen again.
And my little sister was a casualty of my pre-teen and early teen rage, my fear and most of all just overwhelm.
Sasha, you needed gentleness growing up, and we never gave it to you. None of us did.
It's something I can never forget, and I don't know if we will ever have closure. I don't know if you will ever talk to me again.
I want you to know that I am so sorry.
I only hope that you have learned to set boundaries with the rest of our family as well as you finally did with me.
Because, knowing what I know now, of how my mother weaves her web like a spider and pits family members against each other, I cannot imagine that you are doing ok if you are still talking to that woman.
I worry that you blocked me because of her, because of her relentless pressure, manipulation and twisting - twisting the knife, twisting the truth, twisting the reality.
I really hope we will have a chance to talk again, and that I can one day repair, make amends or give us both closure in some way for everything I did in my youth.
And most of all, I really hope you can find healing, in the better, more loving and compassionate life I know you live now, far away from any of them and surrounded, I hope and believe, by far more love than you experienced as a child.
But CPTSD is difficult to heal.
Nowadays I feel weary, like an old, rusty machine, creaking and groaning, straining through it all, trying not to sputter to a halt.
But healing is there, and I do believe it.
I hope that you find it, surrounded by people now that I know do love and support you.
I am so glad to have known you, in the spring of my life, and I truly hope you will live in eternal spring.
Thanks for reading!
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