#low-contact

I've always been the one that was shit on because I was undiagnosed with bipolar disorder until I was in my 30s and therefore always in some type of altered state, except for those rare times that my brain chemistry cooperated with me ... my sister learned how to behave around them safely by watching how they treated me & both absorbed what they were teaching as The Way Things Should Be and avoided punishment by being super secretive about literally everything

So now I'm walking her through both the grieving and anger phases of mentally and emotionally divorcing your parents; I still maintain basic contact with both of them, more out of curiosity than anything else, but she is going full-on scorched earth ... which, to be fair, I did the same thing right after I started college, and the only thing that reunited us (and I say reunited very loosely - our relationship has never recovered) was a near-death experience when my shitty 1987 Ford Escort hatchback was hit by a semi on I-40

And it's not like this wasn't a long time coming. I think I first saw signs of it when my parents voted for Trump the first time. My sister was horrified that they'd do such a thing, considering all the bad press and just his reputation in general, and when I moved in with her back in 2020, we had this huge fight that aired out a lot of grievances that we'd held against each other for literal decades that were all based upon my parents' treatment of us ... I saw the light bulb go off and it was like, "Yo, you see what I've been dealing with since I was old enough to know they were treating me like shit??"