Cutting… A fun game to play

This is the story of how my sister dragged me into her darkness long before I even knew the world had shadows.

She spent her life circling the edge of something none of us had the vocabulary for. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. The kind of suicidal spirals that didn’t just hit — they detonated. Every attempt was another crater in the family, another night of sirens, another morning where no one made eye contact at breakfast. She left emotional wreckage the way storms leave debris: everywhere, without apology.

She’s been gone eight years now, but the fallout hasn’t stopped. It still hums under my skin like a low electrical current. Trauma doesn’t disappear — it just changes shape.

Growing up, I didn’t understand her. I only understood the aftermath. The manipulation. The chaos. The way she weaponized her diagnosis to dodge accountability. My parents were terrified of losing her, so they let her rewrite the rules of the house. They excused what shouldn’t have been excused. They ignored what shouldn’t have been ignored. And in the middle of all that fear, I was the collateral damage.

She hurt herself often — not quietly, not secretly, but with a kind of ritualistic devotion that left her body covered in the history of her pain. By adulthood, she hid her skin like it was evidence. We never knew what she felt when she did it. Maybe she didn’t either. Maybe that was the point.

One day, when I was still young enough to think that any attention from an older sibling was a blessing, she invited me into her room.

My parents let her babysit me. Because why not? What harm could she possibly do?

Her room was dim, stale, heavy — the kind of heavy that settles in your lungs. She sat me down and revealed the marks she’d already carved into herself. She spoke in a voice that didn’t match the moment — soft, warm, almost tender. The kind of voice adults use when they’re teaching a child something important.

She made the darkness sound normal. She made it sound safe. She made it sound like something I was supposed to understand.

And I believed her. Because I was a kid. Because she was my sister. Because no one had ever told me that danger could smile at you.

She guided me. She shaped my hand with hers. She made it feel like a lesson, like a ritual, like a secret she was letting me in on. She made me think I was helping her. She made me think I was needed. She taught me how to cut her.

That was the real violation — not the act itself, but the way she rewired my sense of trust. The way she taught me that love could come wrapped in manipulation. The way she made me mistake her darkness for connection.

It took me decades to understand what happened in that room. Decades to understand the betrayal. Decades to understand the anger that still burns in me like a pilot light.

I loved my sister. And I hated her for what she did to me. Both truths live in me, side by side, refusing to cancel each other out.

That moment in her room wasn’t just a memory. It was the beginning of a shadow that followed me into adulthood, into relationships, into the way I understood safety.

A shadow that stayed long after she was gone.