Why was she in my room?
Dec. 12th, 2002 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beandelphikiI got absolutely tired of waiting for my sister to find PoA for me, so I went into her room today and found it myself. Yeah, fine. I shouldn't violate her personal space. But you know what...
...I found one of my books in her room. One that I NEVER would let leave my room, ever, due to the content. So I know she's been in my room.
And I was mildly disturbed when I saw what book she's borrowed - it's one of my true-crime collection, If Loving You Is Wrong. It's about Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher arrested a few years back for having two children by her 12-year-old elementary school student. (Yes, true-crime is a trashy genre. Oh, well. I admit to having no standards.)
I keep that in my room with a few other books I've bought on the sly. I'm not hiding them because I'm not "allowed" to read them - my parents have NEVER put restrictions on what I can read - but because I know it would make them uncomfortable to know I spend my money on books like that.
Just as it bothers ME to know that, out of all the books she could have taken from my room, my sister took THIS one.
It disturbs me to think that she is secretly as enthralled as I am by everything dark, dirty and evil. I tend to hold her to a different standard of behaviour than I do myself, and I've been careful for the past several years to try and steer her AWAY from my reading material, my private journals, my music and my thoughts.
She might like the dark, but she seems too naive to have a clue what to do with it. More naive than I ever was, and I think that says something. For all the clueless-ness on my part, I have to say that I've always had a fundamental understanding that people are dark and will serve themselves where possible, and will hurt others if they have to. My sister never seemed to get that when we were kids. She was a huge target for nasty things I did to her, and we're not talking brotherly teasing. I got her to do some squicky things before I got old enough to want to hide those things from her. "Little" things like stealing and breaking into other people's homes, and things like trying to torture our cat, and hold other kids underwater until they passed out. I played around pain and killing people.
Then...I stopped showing that to her. Sometime around the age when I started wanting to grow up and be a man, and protect the innocent. When everything was black and white, and I decided that I was black, and she was white, and I therefore had to stop showing her black things.
My parents, I think, feel much the same way. My dad used to call me names a lot, and punch me around. Once he tried to strangle me, before my mom stopped him.
My sister never seemed to get so much of that from my dad. And he hugged her more. Did he ever hug me if he didn't have to? I don't think so.
Once I mentioned this to my mom. I asked her WHY? Why me? Why not Nicole?
And her response was that everyone knows Nicole is more fragile than me. That she couldn't "take" some of the things I can and bounce back. I'm the brave one,and she's the femme fatale.
I wondered if she wasn't the brave one, because she can show what she really feels, and I just fold back in on myself in a mental chaos of bloodpainhurtyoubloodRAGEdie.
In Gr. 11, I had to do a research paper on someone who lived in the 1700's for social studies. Rather than do any one of the names on the list my teacher gave me, I requested to do my paper on the life of the Divine Marquis de Sade instead.
When my English teacher spotted that paper lying on my desk the day I got it back, he picked it up and started laughing. "It's so like you," he said. "So perfectly like you to choose to do this on the man the word sadism comes from."
I was a little stunned. I asked him why he said that.
"Oh, I've never met another student who liked Poe as much as you do. Favorite Poe story?"
"The Pit and the Pendulum."
He just laughed.
I keep thinking - my sister's not like me, is she? Is she?
So many thoughts.
...I found one of my books in her room. One that I NEVER would let leave my room, ever, due to the content. So I know she's been in my room.
And I was mildly disturbed when I saw what book she's borrowed - it's one of my true-crime collection, If Loving You Is Wrong. It's about Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher arrested a few years back for having two children by her 12-year-old elementary school student. (Yes, true-crime is a trashy genre. Oh, well. I admit to having no standards.)
I keep that in my room with a few other books I've bought on the sly. I'm not hiding them because I'm not "allowed" to read them - my parents have NEVER put restrictions on what I can read - but because I know it would make them uncomfortable to know I spend my money on books like that.
Just as it bothers ME to know that, out of all the books she could have taken from my room, my sister took THIS one.
It disturbs me to think that she is secretly as enthralled as I am by everything dark, dirty and evil. I tend to hold her to a different standard of behaviour than I do myself, and I've been careful for the past several years to try and steer her AWAY from my reading material, my private journals, my music and my thoughts.
She might like the dark, but she seems too naive to have a clue what to do with it. More naive than I ever was, and I think that says something. For all the clueless-ness on my part, I have to say that I've always had a fundamental understanding that people are dark and will serve themselves where possible, and will hurt others if they have to. My sister never seemed to get that when we were kids. She was a huge target for nasty things I did to her, and we're not talking brotherly teasing. I got her to do some squicky things before I got old enough to want to hide those things from her. "Little" things like stealing and breaking into other people's homes, and things like trying to torture our cat, and hold other kids underwater until they passed out. I played around pain and killing people.
Then...I stopped showing that to her. Sometime around the age when I started wanting to grow up and be a man, and protect the innocent. When everything was black and white, and I decided that I was black, and she was white, and I therefore had to stop showing her black things.
My parents, I think, feel much the same way. My dad used to call me names a lot, and punch me around. Once he tried to strangle me, before my mom stopped him.
My sister never seemed to get so much of that from my dad. And he hugged her more. Did he ever hug me if he didn't have to? I don't think so.
Once I mentioned this to my mom. I asked her WHY? Why me? Why not Nicole?
And her response was that everyone knows Nicole is more fragile than me. That she couldn't "take" some of the things I can and bounce back. I'm the brave one,and she's the femme fatale.
I wondered if she wasn't the brave one, because she can show what she really feels, and I just fold back in on myself in a mental chaos of bloodpainhurtyoubloodRAGEdie.
In Gr. 11, I had to do a research paper on someone who lived in the 1700's for social studies. Rather than do any one of the names on the list my teacher gave me, I requested to do my paper on the life of the Divine Marquis de Sade instead.
When my English teacher spotted that paper lying on my desk the day I got it back, he picked it up and started laughing. "It's so like you," he said. "So perfectly like you to choose to do this on the man the word sadism comes from."
I was a little stunned. I asked him why he said that.
"Oh, I've never met another student who liked Poe as much as you do. Favorite Poe story?"
"The Pit and the Pendulum."
He just laughed.
I keep thinking - my sister's not like me, is she? Is she?
So many thoughts.
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Why was she in my room? - old post
Date: 2003-02-07 05:44 am (UTC)It just...
Oh, I was probably in New York... sorry.. where was I?
It just... reminded me so much of Valentine Wiggin, and her struggles with being like/not like Peter Wiggin. I don't think you're Peter. Maybe you were, at one point, but you're much more Bean, now, or Ender.
*hugs*
Sorry... I wish I had something positive to say about this. If anything, I'd say that she probably isn't scarred, and that she probably understands darkness a lot more than you're giving her credit for.
I escaped much of the pain that my sister got, growing up, but I understood it implicitly, if from a different angle than she did. My reactions to it were different, but I understood it, all the same. I still do.
*big huge hugs* and *love*
me