Chapter 22

Mother’s confidence in her ability to dominate our relationship and push boundaries continued to grow along with each success she had, so she again started subtly bemoaning her sorrow that her children did not speak.  She told me that Older Brother was getting his life together, and he wanted to rebuild those bridges he had so completely burned.  She said he wanted to talk to me, no pressure, no agenda, no commitment to anything beyond a single meeting.

I had let Mother cross that boundary already with Younger Brother, so I let her do it again.  I was too tired and sick from chronic illness to stand firm.  Relationships require reciprocity, and it meant so much to her that I felt it would be cruel for me to tell her to shut up about it.  I believed that if I met him, and it doubtless went terribly, I could tell her I tried.  If I met with him, her nagging would stop, at least for a time, and I would have some respite.  It was less exhausting to acquiesce than to continue listening to her go on indefinitely about how I was breaking her heart by not giving him another chance.

What I should have done was told her she was not allowed to talk to me about it, that the relationship between Older Brother and I was not about her, and that how it made her feel was her problem, not mine, but that idea did not so much as cross my mind at the time.

My perception of reciprocity was the primary reason I listened to Mother’s incessant whining, let alone finally caved, but it was not truly reciprocity.  In order for reciprocity to exist, there must be a genuine give and take on both sides of the relationship.  We did not have that.  The only “giving” she did was the illusion of respecting my boundaries, when in truth, I was the one doing all the giving and making all the concessions.  Not only did her beseechment directly defy boundaries I had with her by disrespecting my autonomy and need for security, but it made my relationship with Older Brother about her.  Mother’s whining centered her by emphasizing that her heartbreak over us not speaking was more important than any of his transgressions or bad acts.  In fact, I have no doubt that in her mind his transgressions and bad acts were intrinsically of little to no importance.  She had, after all, approved of his actions and aided him at the time, directly contributing to how things went down.  The fact that his bad acts were important to me was of no concern to her except as an obstacle to overcome, same as any other boundary I attempted to hold.

When I met with Older Brother, it was in a public location.  I wanted to be sure there were witnesses around, that he would receive no more personal information about me than I chose to give him, and I could easily depart without informing him where I lived.  We had a couple drinks, and it went astoundingly well.  We really did have a tremendous amount in common, and with the distance of time it was easy to rekindle that connection.  He admitted to being an alcoholic, but swore he was a functional alcoholic.  He was also taking psychological medication to help with his mental problems, which was fantastic.

I am certain Older Brother did need to be medicated, but bringing it up reinforced the old excuses he had for his bad and abusive behavior.  I did not realize it at the time, but this admission fed into the justification that the things he did while married were at least partly a result of mental illness.  Thus, they were not deliberately malicious, and should be forgiven as unintended mistakes.

He was so smooth, and on such good behavior, that we talked for hours before I finally went home, exhausted but happy, and willing to stay in touch and visit with him when he was in town.  There were, however, significant caveats.  I was not going to wipe the slate clean, because I did not know how much of his old behaviors he might resume if he had the opportunity.  Being medicated was sure to help with that, but it was not a guarantee.  I am willing to give a lot of leeway to mentally ill people as long as they are sincerely managing their illness to the best of their ability, but they are still responsible for the harm caused by their actions, and they are as capable of being deliberately and inexcusably horrible and abusive as anyone else.  In the past it was far too easy for Older Brother to excuse and dismiss his deliberately bad behavior by pointing out his mental and emotional issues.  This had allowed him to completely avoid consequences and accountability, up to and including avoiding doing any work to change the behaviors in the future.

I knew Older Brother was a thief, and I did not trust him no matter how pleasant he was when we met up, so he was not allowed to know where Diana and I were living.  Also, because of my illness, all the effort for connection was on him.  After everything he had put Diana and I through, and with the state of my health, it was not a place I was willing to expend my precious energy.  He also needed to remain on his psychological medication, because I was no longer willing to suffer the consequences of coddling his mental illness.  That was his problem, not mine.  He agreed and we stayed in touch, mostly online.

Through reconnecting with me, Older Brother was also able to reconnect with Diana, but she was as adamant about keeping him at arm’s length as I was, maybe more so.

At first, Older Brother and I talked on the phone every month or two, and we met a couple other times when he came through town.  As time went on, though, his calls became less and less frequent until they stopped altogether.  We were still technically in contact, but what rare interactions we had were almost entirely online.  It became increasingly clear that the main impetus for resuming contact with me was so Older Brother could resume contact with Diana.

The excuse of wanting to repair our friendship was nothing more than another of Older Brother’s deceptions, backed with a now cultivated skill at curated social interactions.  He knew me well enough to know what subjects we could happily discuss, and what subjects should be avoided in order to create the most positive possible experiences.  My propensity for trust made me a particularly easy target for this kind of manipulation, especially since I saw no reason Older Brother would reach out unless he was sincere about making amends with me.

However, like any abuser, Older Brother had a manipulative agenda and an end goal in mind.  Being friendly with me was nothing more than a means to an end, and that end was not our reconciliation.  I have no doubt his efforts at contact slowed as his patience started wearing thin because his true goals remained out of reach.  Diana was not going to let Older Brother worm his way back into her life, and I was not going to facilitate it for him no matter how much time and effort he expended attempting to groom me.  The closest Older Brother got to his goals was connecting with Diana on social media, and he was able to get her phone number.  He never called her to chat.  Instead, he made a habit of calling her around the holidays, drunk, begging her to take him back even though he was supposedly in a happy relationship.

During one trip Diana and I made to San Jose, Older Brother and his significant others were able to come meet us.  He and I had only been in contact for a few months, so optimism was high, and everyone was doing the normal things involved in a genuine reconciliation.  His girlfriend and boyfriend were wonderful people, and Diana and I hit it off with them immediately, establishing a friendship the four of us have since maintained through social media.

As is not only completely reasonable, but absolutely necessary in polyamorous relationships, Older Brother’s significant others expected complete honesty and openness.  We all believed there were no secrets, so Diana and I were able to discuss what had happened years earlier and make them aware of our requirements for continued contact.  His girlfriend in particular was happy to keep Diana and I informed, and she followed through on that promise.

It was easy to tell through social media when Older Brother inevitably became unemployed.  He put a great deal of effort into making sure he overemphatically stated every tiny task he did around their house every day, be that cooking and cleaning, or doing home repairs.  Just like he had done with Diana and I, once he was unemployed and had a living arrangement where other people could mostly support him, he did his best to avoid finding another job.

Apparently, in the years since he left Diana and I, Older Brother had become much savvier about how to be an emotionally manipulative lazy mooch.  He never once lifted a finger to clean or cook in our home, vastly preferring to sit on his computer all day “putting in applications” that never resulted in an interview or job, chatting online, playing video games, or writing some book or other that everyone knew he was never going to finish, let alone publish.

In this romantic relationship, once he was unemployed he put in the effort to do cleaning and cooking and the occasional home repair, and made sure all his online friends knew How Much Work he was doing.  He had learned that if he wanted to avoid pressure to get a job, and to be able to mooch as freely as possible for as long as possible, he needed to give enough appearance of effort to brush off the criticisms he received.  If he had a host of remote friends to witness his efforts, it strengthened his ability to dismiss concerns that he was not contributing as much as he could or should, or in the ways the household needed.

Over time the amount of effort he put into helping around their house dwindled, although his online declarations of effort remained consistent.  He also constantly complained that he could not find a job no matter how hard he looked, but I doubt he was looking any harder than he had when he was living with Diana and me.  If anything, Older Brother was probably looking less, because unemployment was so high no one questioned his difficulty finding a job.  It was a perfect excuse.

Older Brother was briefly employed at a grocery store, and his social media became a constant stream of stories exemplifying how excellent an employee he was, and how much he loved the customers and his co-workers.  By his accounting, he was their star employee, the most productive, fast learning, and cheerful worker they had likely ever had!  He was only working there for a couple of months before they let him go, and once again he was moaning about the state of the economy, and how hard he was working around the house to appease his significant others.  I cannot help but wonder what his coworkers and managers would have to say about his time working at that grocery store, because I have no doubt his posts on social media were mostly or entirely fabricated.

His unemployment went on for some time, until Older Brother’s significant others finally got completely sick of his lack of tangible contributions in the household.  They demanded that he find a job in the next couple months, or they were going to kick him out.  They could not afford to support his free-loading ways in exchange for some cooking and cleaning.  They needed help with bills and living expenses they had been shouldering on his behalf for months, not a live-in housekeeper.

At the same time, Older Brother’s significant others informed Diana and I that he had stopped taking his psych medication, and they also discovered he was stealing his girlfriend’s prescription pain pills.  Since he was now in violation of one of the terms of contact, Diana and I deliberately kept our distance, watched his online behavior, and were informed of further details by his girlfriend.

In an effort to placate his significant others, Older Brother grudgingly signed on with Uber.  He did not have a car at the time, so he accepted an advance, purchased a car, and started “working”.

His online rhetoric changed from complaining about the impossibility of finding work in the current economy, to complaining about the impossibility of making a living working for Uber, even though he was living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He declared, in no uncertain terms, that he was being paid pennies an hour.  It was a racket, a waste of effort, and should be illegal.  This rhetoric was well-received by the majority of his online friends, since at the time Uber was starting to receive some very bad press about questionable policies and employment practices.

The fact that Older Brother was paying back the advance on the car was part of the reason his take-home was so small.  The main reason eventually led to the complete breakup of his relationship, and him being kicked out of their home.  When Older Brother said he was “working”, he usually went to a liquor store, bought all the liquor he had enough cash for, and drove off somewhere quiet to drink.  He maintained this deception for some time, while his significant others were still forced to pay for his upkeep because his paychecks were miniscule, and he was spending most of the money he did make on booze.

Older Brother had not changed for the better by even the tiniest of measures.  He was still completely self-absorbed, a dysfunctional alcoholic, and a manipulatively abusive user.  Just like he had with Diana and I, Older Brother feigned complete honesty and openness with his partners.  Once trust was established, he used that trust to manipulate and lie to them for his own self-gratification and personal gain.  He was thoroughly following in Father’s footsteps, just with more self-confidence, greater skill at social manipulation, and more consistency in maintaining lies and deceptions.

Older Brother’s partners were far kinder to him than I believe he deserved, but having been there, I do completely understand why they were so compassionate with him.  I believe their lenience says a great deal about the caring and kind people they are.  They let him take months to make other arrangements and get out of their home, and he made every day painful for everyone involved.  Being able to watch it play out from a distance made his actions much more obvious than they were when he lived with us, when Diana and I were the ones in the middle of it.  I am certain their lack of objectivity, combined with their compassion, was what Older Brother manipulated to stay attached like a parasite for as long as he did.  Even when you knew intellectually that he was playing the victim card, he did such a good job of it that it was hard not to buy into it to some extent.  Just like with Mother and Father, nothing was ever his own fault, even when it absolutely was, but he was much more skilled than they were at making it look convincing.

Older Brother leaned hard into his social media, playing the pity card with skillful abandon.  His exes were being horribly unfair, wanting to kick him out when he had nowhere to go.  Since his drinking on the job was never publicly exposed, it was not his fault that the job for Uber did not work out.  He swore that due to their payment rates, he simply could never make enough money for it to be worthwhile.  He was still an unemployed victim of the bad economy.  He was still laboring so hard doing domestic tasks in his partners’ home, and they had no sympathy for him.  They were monsters for setting deadlines and expecting him to contribute or get out, deadlines that were repeatedly extended solely for his benefit and to their detriment.

But, apparently those things were not enough.  Older Brother needed another angle to prove why his life was entirely out of his control and he was a victim of bad circumstances and heartless draconian exes.  He could delay moving out, but it had become clear that his relationship was destroyed, and he would not be able to delay indefinitely.  Since doing work around the house was no longer a means of getting what he truly wanted, a free ride, I have no doubt that his motivation to do even that much for the household plummeted into nonexistence.  In order to explain his dwindling efforts around the house to his online support network, Older Brother started complaining about a lack of spoons, and how grossly unfair his entire existence was.

For those of you who are not familiar, the Spoon Theory is a metaphor for the limitations of chronic illness.  Basically, many people with chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, and some disabilities have a limited number of spoons for the day.  “Spoons” represent the amount of energy a person has for doing activities.  When you have such a condition, every task you do, including talking to people, brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, and getting clothes together to put on after the shower, let alone the shower itself, are all actions that take spoons.  Once you are out of spoons, you have nothing left to give for the day, and sitting on the couch for a while or taking a nap is not going to fix that.

I have been healthy, and now I have a chronic illness that includes chronic pain and chronic fatigue among other assorted symptoms.  There was a time in my life when I would have counted the entire process of bathing as a single easy task, including getting clothes together, getting a towel, maybe scrubbing the tub, taking the shower itself, drying off, and getting dressed after.  If I was tired, I could simply ignore the tiredness or rest for a just few minutes before tackling the whole endeavor.  Now that I have a chronic illness, each of those individual before and after tasks takes a noticeable chunk of my energy, and since I do not have a tub, the effort of standing in the shower and bathing usually eats up at least a couple spoons.  If I am already tired, I simply will not be bathing that day, because I do not have the capacity for that much activity.

I literally had no concept of what it meant to be chronically ill until I was chronically ill.  No matter how “understanding” I thought I was, I simply had no frame of reference.  It was too far outside the scope of my personal experience.  There is only one experience I ever had when I was healthy that came remotely close to the overwhelming exhaustion of chronic illness.  If you have ever had the flu, cold, or other illness so bad that it seems to take an insane amount of effort just to walk into the kitchen and get some food, that is a small taste of chronic fatigue.  Except with chronic fatigue, you do not bounce back a few days later.  Instead, that is the reality you live with and have to take into account every single day, potentially for the rest of your life.

There are some people who like the proliferation of the Spoon Theory, and the fact that some healthy people are using the metaphor.  They feel it increases awareness.  I do not see it that way.  I see it as belittling and diluting the metaphor.  When someone who is healthy uses the metaphor to describe being tired at the end of the day, they are drawing an equivalency in their mind between that very normal level of tiredness and the debilitating exhaustion of chronic illness.

However, the two experiences of being “tired” are not even remotely the same.  It is a false equivalency that undercuts the severity of chronic illness by giving healthy people a sense that they understand and can personally relate, when the experience of being chronically ill is actually very different.  It is not unlike thinking that just because you have experienced a tension headache, you can relate to the experience of a classic migraine with auras.  They are both technically headaches because they happen in the head and involve pain sensations, but the visceral experiences of those two headaches are so vastly different as to be incomparable.  Casual use of the Spoon Theory creates a similar false equivalency which reinforces stereotypes of chronically ill people as lazy, unmotivated, or hypochondriacs, especially when the illness is invisible.  That false equivalency implies that if the chronically ill person really wanted to, they could still do all the things that healthy (but tired) person is doing.  After all, both people are using the same metaphor to describe their physical experience.

If you think you are reasonably healthy, but your capacity for activity can genuinely be described in terms of spoons, you might not be as healthy as you think you are.

Older Brother kept whining online about how few spoons he had, and how he had spent them all doing chores for his evil oppressors, leaving him without the capacity to find new accommodations or a job, or to even relax.  Not only did the Spoon Theory justify Older Brother’s dwindling aid around the house, but it also provided an excuse for why he was not able to find a new place to live, or a job to pay rent with.  It unequivocally explained why he was forced to be a mooch and created the perception that criticizing his status as a mooch would be ableist.

Despite Older Brothers laments and complaints, his tone was typically light, almost as though he was joking about his spoon “limitations”.  It is definitely true that chronic illness can easily limit activities in that way, but as someone who is disabled and knows him very well, it was bothering me more and more each time I saw it.  What little he said about the Spoon Theory was such a rote description of how the metaphor works that it implied he was being deceptive yet again.  Also, he had never said anything about having a physical illness or disability, and I had no doubt he would have been milking it for sympathy and money if he was even a fraction as sick as I was.

Some mental illnesses do affect people in ways that can be described by the Spoon Theory, but Older Brother barely talked about his mental illness privately, and never talked about it publicly.  In private, he gave the impression that it was relatively minor and only affected his behavior, not his physical capabilities.  Also, Older Brother was in a self-destructive situation of his own methodical creation while attempting to scam the easiest possible ride.  His situation was not an accident or happenstance of mental illness.  Instead of doing anything to actually address his mental problems, he used his mental illness as an excuse to avoid changing his selfishly motivated toxic and abusive behaviors.

On the rare occasions Older Brother had mentioned any mental illness, it was only in the vaguest possible ways, to excuse and dismiss bad behavior for which he did not have a different excuse or deflection.  It was his last-resort, and most blanketing excuse.   Mental illness is difficult, so it deserves compassion and patience.  What it does not do is provide a free pass to be a wantonly terrible person.  Older Brother was doing exactly that, acting as the poster child for how to socially undermine other people with mental illness by playing into stereotypes and ableist assumptions for pity and personal gain.

Aside from the alcoholism Older Brother was not discussing online, he had never divulged the exact nature of his mental illness(es?).  If his mental illness was creating physical limitations, he was doing everything he could to make it worse, not better, by his own deliberately chosen actions day in and day out.  If he was so deeply sabotaging himself, no one else could truly help him, and as far as I am concerned, they were under no obligation to waste their own efforts and money trying.  The fact that he was abusive, manipulative, and deceptive on top of it meant other people were even less obligated to facilitate his selfishness.

It is important to be compassionate about mental illness, but that compassion does not include being used as a doormat or otherwise suffering ongoing personal harm, especially when the harm is deliberately inflicted.

Older Brother’s flippant disregard and disrespect for the problems of debilitating illness ate at me, until I had to speak up.  If I was in contact with him, I could not just ignore what he did.  Attempting to ignore it was stressing me out, interfering with my sleep, and making my genuine chronic symptoms worse.

So, I wrote Older Brother a private message. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he had contracted some serious chronic illness he had not told me about, and explained why I was upset about his use of the spoon metaphore if he was not chronically ill.  I needed to know for certain if he was presenting himself as disabled as part of a con, and thus creating harm for people like myself who genuinely do suffer from disability and chronic illness.  My message was a bit more accusatory than would have been ideal, but that resulted from my frustration at his downward spiral and his history of habitual deceit.  I made sure to ask him multiple times if I was wrong and he was genuinely sick in some way.  Honestly though, because of his history of lies and other bad behavior, I was not going to believe him unless he offered a specific and plausible explanation.

The reply I received early the next morning was gaslighting and emotional manipulation from beginning to end.  Older Brother said that my complaints were completely uncalled for and cussed out both me and my high horse.  He stated emphatically that he did have “health problems” that were best described by the Spoon Theory, without giving any hints or details or explanation beyond those two words.  Instead, he mentioned several things going on in his life that had nothing at all to do with chronic illness as though they did, including accusing his ex-girlfriend of violence and claiming to be trapped against his will in the housing situation he had blatantly refused to leave for multiple months.  At the end of his message, he launched into a tirade about how I needed to get some perspective and figure out how to suck it up and apologize to him for my message.

Somewhere in the middle, Older Brother did give a classic non-apology apology of “I’m sorry you took offense,” which is a passive-aggressive way of admitting no guilt and placing all the burden of wrongness on the person who was offended.  In writing that, he made it clear that he believed the bad act was me taking offense, rather than him being offensive.  A genuine apology would have been, “I’m sorry I offended you,” but he was not sorry for offending me, not in the least.  He also made sure to point out that I was causing him to burn one of his precious spoons in replying to me, so that I would know he was not going to give up milking the metaphor for sympathy and social brownie points.

His coup de grace was, “we really don’t have any need to ever talk again until family funerals force our interaction again some (hopefully distant) day.”

The end of my message was, “So, am I pissed off for nothing? Do you have some debilitating illness you haven’t told me about (because if you do I would want to know and would keep it quiet if you don’t want it public)? If your health is still well, did you not realize how offensive you were being? Is it some fad your friend group thinks is cute?  Please let me know.”

As you can see, I offered a number of specific excuses that could have provided forgiveness for his thoughtlessness, even if he was not disabled, but admitting to any of those would have required him to stop using the metaphor falsely.  I explicitly asked him to answer any one of them so I could calm down.  I ended my message with “Please let me know,” practically begging him to tell me some excusable reason for his behavior.  If he had been as calculating as normal, he could have chosen the most appealing of those provided options and given an answer I was primed to accept, with almost no effort on his part.

Instead, the very last line of his reply was a troll-worthy mocking quote plucked from my message to him.  In his reply to me, “Please let me know,” quotes and all, could only be referring to whether or not I would be apologizing to him.  He was so offended I questioned him, that my desire for an explanation was an insult to his person.  He clearly believed I needed to suck it up and apologize to him for questioning his behavior, for being offended.  Even after everything he had done to me and Diana over the years, in his mind I was supposed to let him behave badly whenever he wanted, without any question.  He could do no wrong, and he was angry enough to let me know he felt that way.  He was probably also angry that I ever held him accountable for any of his bad actions.

I may not have been as tactful as I could have been, or arguably should have been, but I explicitly gave Older Brother a chance to explain, rather than outright condemning him for yet another bad act.  It was a chance he did not deserve, but I gave it to him anyway.

It was clear Older Brother hoped I would be devastated and feel guilty for questioning his motives.  Although I had hoped for better, I was not at all surprised by his response.  I could not and cannot bring myself to believe him about having an unnamed severe illness.  Not only is he a habitual liar with a long history of manipulation to garner sympathy and support, but he understands the importance of including plausible details when conducting a con.  The lack of any and all details screamed insincerity, just like it did when Mother and Father claimed they had unparalleled ignorance of drugs.  Years before I had a diagnosis for my chronic illness, I could state several very specific symptoms which were significantly impacting my ability to function on even basic levels.  Yet Older Brother could offer nothing except gaslighting, deflection, unusually obvious lies, and personal accusations.  He did not even offer a vague description of symptoms, let alone state what general kind of health problem he was experiencing.  He did not even indicate if the root of his problems was physical or mental.

I do believe that no one is under any obligation to discuss their health problems with other people unless they want to, but in Older Brother’s case silence was a red flag for multiple reasons.  He was milking social media for sympathy and support, and being able to add details about a genuine illness would have bolstered those efforts and made him look like even more of a victim.  However, he had spent his entire adult life weaving carefully curated deceptions to manipulate others, so he knew better than to provide details that could be verified as lies.  Like Mother who had eventually focused on “sugar allergy” instead of hypoglycemia, naming a specific known illness with specific symptoms Older Brother clearly did not have would have undermined his con.

I was personally in the throws of severe invisible chronic illness, and although no two experiences of chronic illness are identical, there are similarities of experience which can barely be comprehended by people who have not lived through it.  Thus, I understood enough about the broader realities of chronic illness that I was likely to realize if he was lying to me, and he knew better than to try and create a detailed deception with someone who knew more about the subject of the con than he did.  Lastly, because chronic illness is such an exclusive club, we tend to gravitate towards each other for support and understanding.  If Older Brother had genuinely been struggling with chronic illness, and had genuinely considered me a friend, I expect I would have been one of the first people he talked to about it, because I was potentially the only person he knew who would have been able to relate and provide camaraderie as he adjusted to his new limitations.  It can be an incredibly painful adjustment to make, involving a lot of grieving for how things used to be and what will never be.

Family that gaslights is family that is not worth knowing.  Regardless of why exactly Older Brother responded with gaslighting and emotional manipulation – regardless of what he was hiding or lying about – regardless of whether or not he actually did or did not have a serious illness – not only did he blow up at me for questioning him, I expected it.  It was a predictable outcome for challenging his con.  Older Brother had likely realized he was never going to be able to get close enough to manipulate me the way he wanted to, and he knew me well enough to realize that his angry response would make me cut him out of my life again, so he took that step and declared that I was cut off from him.

That was fine with me.  I felt it saved me the trouble.  I unfriended him on social media and I never wrote to him again.  I kept his number in my phone so I would have warning if he attempted to call, but he never has.

When Older Brother wrote me again two weeks later, the contrast between the two messages was night and day. One of the details Older Brother mentioned in his first infuriated reply was that he was in the throws of some kind of short-term illness that had given him a high fever, diarrhea, and vomiting.  Given my long history with Older Brother, I have no doubt that his first reply was the emotionally honest one.  It was delivered with passion in the heat of the moment, after I blindsided him with a criticism he did not expect, a criticism that threatened one of his current big cons.  Thanks to that short-term illness, he was likely genuinely too sick to curate his words like he normally would have.  It was a stroke of good luck for me, and bad luck for him.

That first reply reflected Older Brother’s true feelings, which was a stark contrast to the carefully curated social manipulation of the second reply.  In the second reply, he explicitly apologized to the point of self-depreciation, and insisted he still wanted our friendship to continue.  He claimed such uselessly vague ownership about being a “bad brother” that it reminded me of Mother and Father’s fake “we made mistakes while you were growing up” apology.  Lastly, he finished by implying (though not directly stating) that he had cancer and could die any day.  Even reading it now, more than four years later, the message sounds as sincere and honest and recalcitrant as I would have expected from any of our in-person encounters where he was on point parroting the behaviors of an honest and sincere friend.  Had he sent that message first instead of second, I probably would have once again eaten his plate of bull.  I am lucky I accidentally chose the night he was miserably sick, because instead he impulsively sent the angry message.  Like when he lost his patience and robbed Diana and I blind, Older Brother showed his true colors.

Older Brother was careful not to outright admit to any lies, insisting that although his situation was not as severe as mine, he did have days when the Spoon Theory described his life.  I am certain he believed he was covering his ass, but instead he only exposed it further.  Genuine chronic illness does not work like that, where you only need to worry about spoons on “some days”.  The number of available spoons can vary dramatically, because there are better days and there are worse days, and there may even be days when you feel mostly normal, but there are never days when you can consequence-free completely ignore a chronic illness.  It is always there and must be taken into account.  If you happen to feel well enough to ignore your illness and then proceed to do so with reckless abandon, it has a way of biting you in the ass with a significant uptick in symptom severity.

If you think the metaphor only applies “some days”, it is far more likely you are burning the candle at both ends, burning out, or drawing a false equivalency for those days when stress and normal exhaustion seem overwhelming, because even healthy people have bad days, and stress can do some pretty awful things even to otherwise healthy people.

Older Brother had built a house of cards with lies and deceptions.  It might have been a very carefully constructed house, probably cheating with some glue at key points where it was unlikely to be noticed, but it was still a house of cards.  All it took was him having one moment of enraged passion and emotional honesty to bring it tumbling down.

I was done, but it was not the hot and angry done of the first time I ceased contact with Older Brother.  It was a melancholy and disappointed done because it was predictable and expected.  I let everything he did slide until I no longer could, because like with Mother and Father, letting things slide was necessary to have any relationship at all.  I wanted to be fair, and did not want to be cruelly judgmental, so I recognized that if he was genuinely trying to change, it was going to take time and he was bound to make mistakes.  I had to give him the time and opportunity to prove that he had changed for the better, or to provide undeniable proof of what I already knew was truly going on in our relationship.  Confirmation had finally come.  Older Brother’s replies were a stamp of confirmation that nothing had really changed at all.  There was nothing left to prove, and nothing left to gain.  I knew I would never have contact with him again, for any reason, even at that hypothetical future family funeral, and I knew that was for the best.

In some ways I regret that I gave Older Brother that second chance.  I would love to say that I knew it would turn out that way when we reconnected, but I would be lying.  I wanted to think better of him, like I had when we were youths.  I had some hope that he might have changed for the better, and so once our reconnection started, things needed to run their course.  The anger of how our relationship ended the first time meant my boundaries were unstable and poisoned with unresolved resentment and confused betrayal.  They were ripe for external manipulation, because despite all the good reasons not to contact or trust him, the anger at our estrangement and my heartache over our relationship destabilized my ability to maintain those boundaries.  I was angry, not just because of his bad deeds, but because of all the years I spent emotionally investing in a relationship I still valued greatly.  That value and importance I placed on our past relationship prevented me from achieving a firm and completely stable foundation moving forward without him.

The way our relationship ended the second time provided calm closure.  Older Brother may never have admitted to anything directly, but he still showed his hand.  I had the closure of receiving proof that I was not misreading things, and that my interpretation of events, past and present, were fully valid and completely correct.  I knew, undeniably, in a way that provided a solid and healing foundation, that I was not missing out by not having him in my life.  The things that had seemed good about our relationship had never been real, not even a little.  They were simply connection points he could exploit when he felt he had something to gain from me.

With calm sadness, I let go of the perception that our relationship had ever been sincere for him.  Unlike the first time I stopped talking to Older Brother, I could mourn the fact that our friendship never truly existed at all, no matter how much I had invested in it during a different time in my life.  I knew to the depths of my soul and the top of my consciousness that our friendship always was, and always would be, nothing more than an illusion.

Like any illusion, there was nothing there to genuinely hold on to, so I could let it go.