I remember the first time I consciously created a separation in my mind when it came to people.
I was around 4, my brother was 7 or so, and my parents had had some kind of blow up about something related to him. I'm not sure if the words were ever said out loud, but it became clear from the argument that my brother was the 'problem' child and I was the 'considerate' one. I remember my brother and I were in our shared bedroom at that time overhearing this. That was the moment when I decided that I didn't care what my parents thought about my brother, or why, because those reasons didn't apply to me. I became the 2 foot wall between my parents and him, I became the supplier of my pocket money, I became the holder of secrets that would otherwise have got him a much-deserved thrashing. Because as far as I was concerned, he was and continued to be my favorite person, no matter what the others said.
This one action, very early on, taught me to separate my judgement of an individual's actions and their resultant impact on others, from what I considered "who" a person was. You did a bad thing, but that didn't necessarily make you a bad person and on the flip side, if you did a good thing, it didn't mean you didn't have nefarious motivations.
This single point ability has been my compass as I navigate my personal relationships. As compasses go, it's not ideal but it does explain how I'm friends with people who can't stand each other, how I can attempt friendships with exes, how my cousins and I remain on decent talking terms despite our parents being estranged from each other, how I have independent, functional relationships with my very dysfunctional family etc.
It's also why I have a very compartmentalized way of having conversations about my relationships with people I'm in relationships with - platonic, romantic or professional.
One broad separation is : Since there's no point talking to people about others they don't know, that immediately eliminates large sections of overlap. For example : my mother's family doesn't know much about my father's family, and my paternal step family barely knows anyone in my original nuclear family and my ex-maternal step family knows only 3 members of my maternal from-birth family. Similarly, my School friends don't know my Undergrad friends who don't know my Masters friends who don't know my Work friends who don't know my multiple Families.
Add to this the interpersonal dynamics. Subset Family I can't stand all the members within it. Subset Work Friends can't talk openly about other members in the same group without impacting possible future earnings. Subset Exes who Work Together - Well, that's a whole different dynamic and yep, I can't talk about one to the other. I'm not even sure they know that they belong to the same subset to be honest.
Tangentially, I now have a Subset of Dating App Hook Ups, a small number of free-floating, often fun, professionals who sometimes happen to wander into professional meetings I'm having with Subset Colleagues. Not just that, once it's over, they also send a message like "Hey, the meeting went well, and here's hoping we can work together" right below a series of sizzling sexts that have been exchanged a few weeks prior with no follow up from either end.
While this isn't what I specifically want to talk about, I do wonder if a 'double thumbs up' emoji is an adequate response to communicate "I accept your bid to pretend we don't know each other and also yes, I too hope working together will be more fun than other shared activities" ? 👍👍
But coming back to why I started this piece : Today I find myself at a full-circle point where I've been cut off by my brother. This sounds way more dramatic than it actually is because (a) this isn't the first time he's cut me off and (b) not talking to each other for years is a family coping mechanism. But it is the first time I'm seriously considering not letting him back into my world - and I'm shocked at how clinically I'm weighing the pros and cons of this.
To offer context - the reason why it's been so easy for me to develop this compartmentalized personal relationship style is because most people I have personal relationships with have often not been in the same city or even the same country as I am. And for the most part, this was an expectation that was set up in me from the very beginning thanks to an Army life upbringing.
My nuclear family unit would move every 2 years, make new friends to leave them behind every 2 years and repeat the cycle. Along with that, we had the routine of traveling every summer vacation to another city to be spent with different extended family members. The expectation of having all the people you care for in the same place or even within driving distance is so alien to me that whenever I find myself within families for whom this is normal, I think it's a real life movie playing out in front of me.
Anyway, we knew we would see others when we would see them and, in the time of expensive long distance phone calls, the only input I would get of these people (mostly family, hardly ever the left behind friends) would be from my mom who would read out relevant bits from intermittent letters addressed to her. Underneath all that was an ever present philosophy : "It is what it is".
And when my nuclear family imploded too, consequently sending us all to different cities and countries... well, we treated each other how we had learned to treat all those other connections : intermittent desultory updates while apart, keeping all our excited energies for when we would meet. And this is where we badly miscalculated.
All that excited energy turned to rage when we realised that it just wasn't the same. It wasn't us four against the world anymore, it was mom against dad, dad against brother, dad against me, mom against brother, aunt against dad, uncle against brother, all of us against the baby-sitter (another story but you get the drift), everyone fighting about money and distance and separation and betrayal and disrespect... and none of us being able to hear what the other was saying :
That we no longer felt safe in this world.
That in a world where we had so blithely left behind connections in the wake of our family, we didn't like being among those left behind by our own. What was worse is that while we had very quickly learned to let go of external bonds with the farewell wave of "it is what it is", we never quite learned how to hold on to the bonds when they were ours, through the bad bits or even pull each other back. We never quite learned "I'm sorry, please let's fix it."
I think this was especially true of what went on between my brother and I. Everytime he would inexplicably cut off contact with me, I would just helplessly watch as that tenuous bond of communication would slip out of my hands. And since we never learned to talk to each other about all the terrible things that happened in our multiple compartments, or how they affected us, we just started afresh every time with something that sounded like "Hey, what's up?" which was almost always met with some version of "Hey, you wouldn't believe what my dog did today!" And years of silence and resentment was pushed under the Carpet of Relief that somehow, miraculously, that broken bond had come back within grasp.
Except this time, it feels different. Maybe it's because I'm in my mid-40s (and women in their 40s are a whole different kind of beast) or that a quick glance through this 18 year old online therapeutic diary has revealed that I've barely ever mentioned my brother except in the context of an awful argument between us almost 16 years ago ago. I went through posts to find some affectionate allusion to him but nope... and this isn't because he's not an affectionate man, it's because in the last 18 years, I've mostly had about 12+ years of silence from him broken up with periods of great laughs. But what was even more revealing was that some of my closest friends I'd made over the last 2 decades didn't know his name. The final nail in the coffin? When I told a few of them that my brother wasn't talking to me again, ALL of them said "Wasn't he already not talking to you? For years?"
There's a term for this kind of silent treatment, rooted in family relationships. It's known as "withholding affection" and is an emotional-abuse term. What was truly revelatory however was that it was one of my favorite people in the world who had subjected me to this while gaslighting me for other things.
And I find myself falling back on my tried and tested method of understanding people - family or friends. You can be a good person who did awful things, or you can be an awful person who did good things. But at the end of the day, I think what truly underscores my relationships is an examination of how they treated ME, specifically, for how long, and why. And while some exes and friends get some kind of a hall pass, because god only knows what kind of trauma they went through, and the gravity of their mistakes, my brother doesn't really qualify for that kind of forgiveness.
Because we both went through what we did, in the same home with the same parents, and we only had each other to count on for understanding. Atleast that's what I always thought. To discover that that same kid (now pushing 50, married with a 5 year old of his own) who got my unearned loyalty, decides that I'm once again not worth his attention is... heartbreaking.
Maybe I'm not being very clinical about this at all. Maybe I'm just done being treated like shit.
