A Letter For Alexandra

My dear sister, I cherish the time we spent together.

Things have changed for me. I can no longer sit by and watch you willingly subject yourself to abuse because you are addicted to attention from our parents. I know what they did to you. I know what they are doing to you.

You have become mean. Even cruel. I had too. Things over the past few years were incredibly hard on everyone. We lost people who died that we loved, we lost friendships, and even lost jobs. Everyone did, not just us. But, before that was all the family shit. Dad doesn’t deserve you. And, neither does mom.

I have spent my time in California to great value. I have studied our generational trauma and I have triumphed over it. I am free at last. But I have no room in my life for you with the burden of our parents attached. They swell your troubles so great that I drown with you each time you let them push you down.

Heed my words, I beg of you, cut them off permanently. Please? I beg you.

I learned that the human brain suffers damage from stress. Trauma is when the brain begins losing function because of the severity of this damage. It may not be much at first, but over time it changes a person. Like it did with them, and then like it did with us. We were sweet kids. Our parents were admittedly not. Mom and dad both bragged about getting in fights in school. They enjoyed bullying people they thought deserved it. You and I never did.

It wasn’t that we were soft, or stupid, or naive. It was because when you and I are uninhibited, we are kind people because we enjoy expressing ourselves that way. That’s why you overate to compensate for your feelings. It’s why I binge drank and we both fucked everyone in Ohio. We were more willing to hurt ourselves than we were other people.

I think about you now, and what I wish for you. Your pain is too great for me to hold you up anymore. That’s because these last few years were too hard for me. I helped stop the insurrection. I helped defeat Trump from turning our country into a wasteland. I helped so many people, for free, and the tax bore great scars on my mind. What I learned was that fun can heal those scars. A great amount of fun can heal all the trauma in the world.

But you won’t embrace my kind of fun. You remain ashamed of smoking weed. You remain ashamed of your body and enjoying getting drunk. You lower yourself to sleeping with men who treat you like shit. I have told you so many times, fuck whoever you want as long as they treat you well. You don’t treat yourself well enough to have the patience to wait for someone who does. That hurts me.

No matter what I say or do, you always find a way to twist it around so that I’m conceited and just pushing my narrative. You would be right if for one thing — our motherfucking parents gave us Stockholm syndrome to make us their puppet pets. I have been reaching for you to join me, free of them for years. And you just won’t let go of them.

I can’t deal with it anymore. I don’t have the room in my heart. I drown when they push you back underwater.

If this means we go our separate ways, then so be it. We’re 40, with luck we’ll live another 60–100 years. But I’m not spending another single minute cleaning up their mess. So now, I’m writing a very public letter to incentivize you to break some shit. I stopped believing in heaven and hell, I broke my belief that there is something after this life. I live with my full chest, trying as hard as I can to make this life worth it because I believe there just isn’t going to be another chance.

There isn’t going to be another chance. Why on earth would you waste another second on losers who fuck with you every time they need to blame someone else for the fact that they fucked up? I know why. Because you love them still. I am asking you to surrender that, because it was manufactured. They designed the system so that you would love them unconditionally. But they won’t even do the same.

The greatest lie they ever told you was that you’d be miserable without them. The truth is that they’re too scared to make the leap themselves, and they want you to stay and comfort their cowardly hearts. Most BPD folks never recover until their mid fifties to mid sixties. Do you know why? Cause that’s when their shit-head parents finally die and they can finally be free. Do you know what that means? If you are free of them, things will get better.

I can’t encourage you any more than I have to be courageous, bold, and tough. I know I have seen these qualities in you. I cannot encourage you to hold onto your anger of abuse, loss of friends and opportunities, and the loss of your family dream due to their shenanigans over and over. The regrets I had I wrote on a piece of paper and stuck to my wall to see every day I went to school in secret of them.

You must summon the strength to see yourself fall down and claw your way back to standing without much help. The world is changing. People like them won’t have a hold on our futures much longer, and they will make you pay if you are still around when that shift happens. It’s best to get out now before the tidal waves ruin the fabricated sands of their foundational shorelines.

I hope you heed me. Save yourself. When you are finally free and able to stand on your own two feet, I’ll be here waiting. But, I don’t have the stomach for more, or else I might just kill them to expedite the process. I have no chill for their abuse any more, not even to witness it happening again to you in the past tense when you don’t tell me about it.

I’m sorry it has to be this way. But as we opened ourselves to the wide world, it was always a gamble that we would be swallowed with the interactions and adventures of others. I must focus on myself if I am to survive what I dealt with.

Remember, Alexandra, I love you. It broke my heart to make this choice, just like it broke my heart to give up on our parents. Remember also what I said about fun. You can heal trauma with fun through hobbies, art, music, laughter, daydreaming, reading and many other cheap or free activities. But, it requires the daring to pick yourself up and go do the things that will reward your mind with the much needed positive reinforcement that will make you more stable. The more you do it, the easier it gets. The easier EVERYTHING gets. And that is the secret they had hoped you would never learn until they were dead and done with us.

Be good to yourself,
Spence