2025.10.30

My best friend said, NO! DO NOT DO IT! STAY AWAY FROM YOUR BROTHER AND TELL YOUR DAD RIGHT NOW!

I'm so blessed to have guardian angels when I need them most. There is always a big sister figure nearby to tell me the truth, to protect me when I can't protect myself, to stop me from sacrificing myself for someone who only means me harm. I've lost contact with that girl, but the few times we reconnected we've always remembered each other fondly. Last I heard, she became a medical doctor and was living a good life. I doubt she'll ever read this, but she saved me. If my brother's no-contact pussy-footing ruined my mental health for the next ten years, an actual rape would have killed me, guaranteed.

So I tattled to dad! You'd think a man ready to throw his adult son out over dirty dishes would be delighted when his minor daughter accused him of sexual abuse, but my father was not a normal man. He said something like, "oh, that's not good." He could barely look me in the face. I'd seen him angrier— and more surprised— over fumbles in football. I hate my dad. Every day I'm glad he's dead so I don't have to screen his calls.

As I remember it, he promised he'd tell my brother to "knock it off." In a few days, the accused apologised to me in that vague, slimy way all abusers do. He never said what he did, why it was bad, or acknowledged any adverse effects on me. I forgave him. Just... y'know. Knock it off. Some months later, he was kicked out for entirely unrelated reasons and went to live with mom. According to my brother, during a conversation we had years afterwards, dad never even confronted him! Hilarious if true. But he might have been lying to make dad seem more negligent than he already was. Maybe he was implying that his sexual abuse going unpunished means it wasn't actually a problem.

After all, in this same conversation, he claimed one reason he attempted to rape me, a child to whom he was directly related, is that... wait for it... I was sometimes undressed in my own home! Wow! My therapist told me that I could have been passed out naked under a Christmas tree and nobody, least of all my own brother, should look at me with lecherous eyes. I wish I'd said something like that instead of dumbly agreeing that uh, yeah, I did wear tanktops and shorts sometimes, haha. He was laughing while he said it, and I was laughing when I agreed, so it was just a joke, right? There's no way he actually believed I was flirting with him, or that my pajamas "naturally" "made him" abuse me... Right???

It is so evil, it borders on absurd. Everyone, myself included, from the time I was an infant, chose to overlook his malevolent patterns. It felt better to focus on the rare moments when he acted like a decent human being. He is an asshole, a liar, a sexual predator, an addict, but uh... a few times, he made you laugh or did you a favour! So he's definitely a good person, deep down! They call that an empathy trap, and it's the one thing my mother will never escape. How can she? That's her son. I forgive her because they have a blood-bond I can't understand. As much as he's betrayed me, he's betrayed her, too.

What do you do when the baby you grew in your womb— lovingly cradled and nurtured as best you could, despite a dead-end marriage fraught with your own emotional and financial abuse— grows up to be the worst kind of man? That's her son! Yet he's so sleazy, self-righteous, sexually deviant, and frankly lazy that he tries to rape his little sister?! It's too painful. Just shove it down.

After the divorce, mom moved away for a better job. Dad made sure I preferred him anyways, so I was happy that I didn't see her much. Every other weekend, she drove for hours and hours, just to take me out for a hamburger and go back home. By and large, dad's manipulation blinded me to her devotion. But on one of these excursions, staring at my lap, I mustered the courage to say, "hey, by the way, I just think you should know..."

She was horrified. Every mother knows her daughter is in near-constant danger of sexual violence, but my brother was the last person we expected to prey on me. By that point, grown men and my male peers, online, in real life, and even in my family, had made advances on me. One old, white pervert at a garage sale was bold enough to yank me close and kiss my hand in front of my mother. I laughed it off because I was, what, ten? But she knew.

I had been conditioned to expect and accept all kinds of mistreatment, but he was never, ever supposed to want sex from me. My brother was supposed to be the one beating up the rapists, or at least threatening to. The reversal flipped everything in my life upside-down. I lost trust in the most basic tenets of reality and spiralled into my first psychotic break. The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to die.

By the time I told mom, I had been lapsing in and out of psychosis for an entire year. Shadow people were stalking me. Grownups were stealing my thoughts. My friends wanted me dead. My family was replaced by actors. Bugs were writhing around in my blood. It was too much, too fast— what could I do but shut down and cry? I'd always been depressed, but now I was missing every other day of school. I started cutting and biting myself. Since the fourth grade, I'd considered my suicide a necessity. Scraping through eleventh, I was finally making serious plans. My therapist demanded I check into a mental hospital.

They gave me pills that did nothing but make me groggy and, after a small overdose, lose time and talk nonsense. That night Dad listened to me babble and found it weird, but ultimately didn't care much. I think he was drunk. By then, he'd stopped cooking, cleaning, or even turning on the heat. I had to put on my coat and boots to go downstairs, but with no food in the house, there was barely any reason to leave my filthy bedroom. At some point my bed frame broke and dad had no intention to fix or replace it. I slept on a jumbo teddybear we got from the supermarket. She had a big, red bowtie. Her name was Bartholomew. I stopped talking to anyone I knew in person, lost touch with my extended family, and became increasingly enmeshed with bad actors on the Internet. I stopped drawing. I stopped going outside. I had nightmares about my father and brother raping me and people I care about. I still have them. After all these years, it's easier to handle, but when I first wake up, I'd be lying if I said I don't want to die.

"Flonne, why are you agoraphobic? Why do you have psychosis? Why were you a NEET? Why are you so weird?"

This is why.

My psychotic disorder is probably also genetic. Though I never met her, my paternal grandmother ostensibly suffered the same affliction. My brother could not relate to my experiences when I explained them, including the fact that they were direct consequences of his actions, LOL. All he could offer was the usual, "oh, that sounds like it sucks." But he is some kind of low-empathy, bipolar maniac with a dozen addictions, so I dunno. Maybe his psychotic symptoms present differently. He definitely lacks the self-awareness required to identify them. My point is that I come by it honestly and will most likely never "be cured." Instead I'll be managing my mental illnesses for the rest of my life. Now that I live in a safe environment and have only honest, compassionate people in my orbit, everything runs so much smoother. Psychosis is just a feature of my menstrual cycle, and not even every month! But we'll get to the health, healing, and Sans Undertale part of all this... soon enough. Sadly, the story isn't over.

Where'd we leave off? I'm not even eighteen and I've completely crashed out of life. Dad and I live in a crack den, minus the crack (as far as I know). I've just told mom, "hey! Your son has been living with you for a while now, but he never mentioned that he repeatedly propisitioned me for sex or that your worthless ex did nothing about it. Maybe that's why I can't look in mirrors or through windows or go to school. And these scratches on my legs are just from the kittens recently born in our home, 'cause dad keeps adopting stray cats but never gets them fixed. Don't worry about that."

I was proud of myself for confiding in her, though nothing changed until they released me from the mental hospital to attend my last year of high school. I thought I could handle it, but within a week I could barely drag myself out of bed. Finally mom rescued me from the filth, hunger, and cold dad had gotten me used to. All my teachers empathised with my situation, so I was allowed to graduate with the bare minimum number of assignments, all submitted online. Mom brought me to live with her, my maternal grandmother, and my literally basement-dwelling brother. I cheerfully greeted him when I arrived. He walked past me as if I wasn't there.

I figured he felt awkward about the whole incest thing, so when Grandma and I baked oatmeal cookies, I left him a plate and a short note. Just "I forgive you" with a drawing of an old meme we used to laugh at. Remember, even when he was trying to rape me, he was first of all my sibling and my friend. I cared about his feelings and enjoyed his companionship. At least I liked that he'd stopped making me cry on my birthday (my complete lack of birthday celebrations notwithstanding). Here I was, forgiving him for the incestuous cherry on top of the you-abused-me-from-infancy cake. A normal person would have been moved by my generosity.

None of the men in my family are normal. The coward made mom speak for him. She brought me to her bedroom and, in a firm but quiet voice, like she couldn't believe this was her real life, ordered me to stay away from my brother. "You two just don't like each other," she said. "He doesn't want anything to do with you."

I was shocked, immediately in tears, trying and failing to hold them back. Mom told me whatever he had done, I misundertood. Whatever he said, I misheard. He was only joking. I was the one overreacting, exaggerating, and making things up, maybe for attention.

"Why would I make this up?" I cried. "I wish it wasn't true!"

"Just stay away from him," she said.

"Fine! Keep him away from me, too!" I locked myself in my room to weep undisturbed.

Remember the part where dad spent my childhood poisoning me against her? He told horrendous lies about her, nitpicked at the smallest mistakes she made. Her children's typical teen angst got blown up into proof she was an unfit parent. (By his standards, not the court's.) He drilled it into my brain that she did not love me, would never accept me, and could not be trusted. For the longest, I was totally brainwashed. I only warmed up to mom when dad started failing so hard at parenting, the "vindictive bitch" became a better option just because her pantry had food in it.

To this day, this is the only time my mother has actually done me harm. And she totally redeems herself later, too, because no... we're still not done. I would like to fast-forward through these years where on the surface, nothing happened. I shared a house with my aspiring rapist, now asserting himself as falsely accused and— in his own words!— "doing everything in his power to make me feel unwelcome."

If we occupied the same room, he'd talk to everyone else and ignore me, like I was a ghost. If I played the ukulele (one of my few healthy hobbies), he blasted music so I couldn't hear myself sing. He flubbed a couple courses at a community college, just so I'd have less money for school when his college fund rolled into mine. He cursed me in his thoughts. The basement radiated with hostile aura. He told anyone who would listen about his stupid-annoying-crazy-idiot sister who just made it up that he wanted to have sex with her, what a freak! When he confessed all this to me later, he said that once he lied to mom, he felt he "had to" commit to this fake narrative. For years, he didn't budge.

Don't worry: I cursed him, too! I was outraged. I had lost my entire life— all of my aspirations and ambitions, most of my friends, and large portions of my personality— to paranoid psychosis directly triggered by his abuse. You made me delusional, but the one thing that ACTUALLY HAPPENED is the part that's not real? LMFAO! If I hadn't been saved at the last minute, I was gonna give you my body for magically healing, totally logical, incestuous statutory rape, JUST to save your no-good, rotten; worthless, fucked-up; fat, ugly, nigger life! And this is how you repay me?! Pissing away my college fund??? LMFAOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

I'm joking around because, actually, living in the same house had me terrified. When my brother dislikes you, or is even mildly annoyed by the idea of you, he turns instantly cruel. He hadn't forced himself on me before, but we were friends then. Now he hated me and must have known I hated him, too. With no obligation to preserve our relationship, with mom on his side, and nowhere for me to run, would he just assault me outright? The only barrier I could see was his conscience. Every hour of every day, I wondered, "will he do it now? Will he do it when I sleep? Will he tell everyone I wanted it? Will they choose him over me again?"

Thankfully, guardian angels continued watching over me. I never told grandma what my brother had done, and I lost all interest in sharing my story after I was disbelieved. But before I told mom, I'd confided in my favourite cousin and her mom. They were horrified but not surprised. He'd creeped on my cousin a couple times, already. My auntie said she never liked my brother, even as a little kid. When she heard we'd be living under the same roof, she asked grandma to always keep me in her line of sight.

I knew none of this. Back then, I was a bratty teenager, annoyed by my lack of alone time. My grandmother passed away years ago and I never got to thank her. She probably would have played dumb anyways, hahaha. She was the warm-hearted kind of person who refused credit for her generosity. I think I was her favourite, too, though I never deserved it since my cousin is 4,000x cooler and better than me. Plus, this whole "being psychologically tortured for my whole life" thing made me a rather irritable child.

I was nineteen when I went to live with my cousin and her family. It was only supposed to be a "vacation" (from what? I was a hikineet, lol), but life was so great when I wasn't under the threat of inevitable sexual abuse— I didn't want to leave! Everyone agreed it was a better environment for me. Doing chores and watching TV with family got me out of my room. Walking the dog with my cousin got me out of the house. I still had no plans for the future, but at least I was mostly content in the present. Of course, just changing my environment couldn't cure me. I had plenty of work to do on my own! Which I began by cold-turkey quitting my antipsychotic medication because, even though it quieted my delusions, it was also making me fat and giving me tics. Within the week I had totally detached from reality.

The world I lived in was a computer simulation, where extra-dimensional entities scrambled my thoughts and memories, tortured me and laughed at my pain. They killed me and desecrated my corpse, then rewound time so I was alive and ready to be killed again. I "felt" this happening to me every day for God knows how long. Over time, it evolved into my family doing the torture, murder, desecrating, laughing, rewinding. I imagined them lurking outside my door, huddled together, brandishing knives.

I drifted in and out of these episodes, trying my best to appear normal (and medicated) to others. One evening, I snapped at my uncle. He calmly replied that I sounded like my brother. Within ten minutes I had my head in a noose. When I felt it working, I got scared and stopped. I do not recommend attempting suicide to motivate change, but that was rock bottom for me. I cried myself to sleep, nursing a new mantra for myself:

I am so worthless, I can't even die. Therefore, I must become interesting.

CONTINUE