Behind It Is Sisyphus

I was filling out a job application on safari when the tab froze. I decided to switch to chrome and just before I could paste the link into the search bar, an article about people who are always available popped up. I almost kept scrolling because I have very little tolerance for that kind of writing. I know how those end before they begin.

Something about the article's title however made me pause so I decided to click on it. The ads on it were hopelessly mannerless but I kept reading anyway. The article built momentum slowly, each sentence adding something to a shape I was starting to recognize. For the first time in a while, I wasn't the person in the essay. Somewhere in the first few paragraphs I started feeling the presence of someone else in the words, like the way you sometimes hear a song and think about a specific person because something in the frequency of the song is theirs.

By the time the essay reached the part on parentification; where a child who grew up watching a parent fold inward and decided without being asked to fill what is missing, it wasn't recognition anymore. It was just him.

My father's move when things got hard was to disappear. He is so good at it you would confuse him for a magician, except he is a very bad one because physically he would still be present. In times of crisis, he completely shuts down. He turns his phone off and the door to him literally closes. He says he does this because he is overwhelmed and honestly, I completely understand. However I think when you are a parent and everyone is looking up to you, overwhelm is something that should happen inside you because at the end of the day, the problem stays and your children who do not yet know how to navigate the world are looking up to you. When you disappear, the children who are old enough to understand watch one parent collapse and the other carrying the whole load by themselves and they learn to either do the same or to fill the gap themselves.

My brother learned the latter very young. I think he decided somewhere in that silence that he would be the opposite of him. He signed the contract to be the deputy parent and he honored it in every way a person can. He worked and built himself into someone who could hold things. He became financially present where my father was absent and emotionally available when he vanished. Him taking up this role created a duality in him I have always lived inside; he is my brother and he is something closer to a father, and the line between the two has never been clean.

He taught me how to dream. On visiting days in high school he would show up with snacks and books; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Alchemist, Purple Hibiscus, the Twilight series, The Secret, The Prince, a whole pile of worlds he thought I needed to see. I hated school and could not make myself care about what was being taught even when I knew I had to but those books were my only way to disappear from a world that was asking things of me I couldn't give two shits about.

He helped with my assignments but he wouldn't do them for me. He would sit with me while I struggled for hours until I got it right. He showed up to things. He supported every dream I started even while knowing I have the attention span of a chicken. That I would begin things with everything I had and lose the thread halfway through. He helped me get to conferences, backed endeavors I abandoned, stood behind ambitions I couldn't always sustain and he did it without keeping score.

Then there was this one time he showed up for me physically. We were kids and I had gone out playing with some friends. Somewhere in between a boy beat me senseless. I had gone to defend someone smaller the way I have always done because I have never quite known my own limits or been willing to respect them. In my advocate spirit, I chronically underestimated the boy. He was older and bigger and he beat me until I went home crying. My brother saw me and asked what happened. I told him and we sat there quiet. I think I got over it and went on with the day but that evening the boy's parents arrived at our door to complain to my mum. Apparently, my brother had gone and returned the favor quietly without telling anyone. I was so proud. I don't know what my mum told him that day but I bet she was proud too.

That's my brother and that is who he has always been.

When something breaks for me, I never scroll. My brother's name is just there. He has never once picked up and made my liturgies of complaint about himself. He doesn't offer parallel stories or personal anecdotes to cushion the distance between my problem and his attention. He just listens and works through it with me until something shifts.

I have called him in crisis more times than I can count and that dynamic; me falling, him catching, formed so early and completely that there was never a road running the other direction. This is not because I don't love him though. It's because the architecture of our relationship never had a door on that side. I have tried to break in to it a few times but it always ends the same:

Me: Hi? You there? How are you?

Him: I'm fine.

Reading that article made me see myself very clearly as the person who always calls and I was so ashamed. The shame I feel however is complicated because most of the times I have called were in crisis. It's also not exclusively held by that but also in a question I have never been able to answer: who is he beyond everything he has done for me?

I know his acts, the texture of his care, the shape of his presence in my worst moments but I am not familiar with his interior. What is he carrying? What are his fears? What does he want? What keeps him up at night? Unfortunately, that is a room I have never been able to enter despite trying so many times. The grief of not knowing him sometimes moves me to pick up the phone and call him but we always repeat our special routine.

How are you? How is everyone? How is your family? Are they okay? Oh good. Talk later. Bye.

And I am back where I started. Sometimes there's a small window in texts where we let each other in but time zones or life closes it and we go back to how we were. We never fully arrive but we get close enough that I know the door is not locked from the inside forever. I don't blame myself for not knowing him. Our relationship dynamic was built before either of us had any say in it and I grieve it. I feel sad that I don't know who he is when no one needs anything from him. It feels even worse that our relationship has never made space for that person to appear.

When our calls end there is so much left unsaid on my end. It feels like those movie scenes where two people are just about to say the real thing and you are watching from the outside, knowing both of their interiors, wanting to reach through the screen. However I am not on the outside and I am one of the two people and the scene always ends the same way.

In those movies, the characters always discover the full picture later and I don't want to do that with him. I don't want to one day sit somewhere and say I wish I had known sooner or I wish we had found a way through.

I feel a very heavy weight behind his "I am fine" but he hasn't named it yet and I cannot do it for him. What I can say is that when I think about him, I think of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill endlessly without relief.

Albert Camus said one must imagine Sisyphus happy. That owning our struggles gives us freedom. However when I think about my brother, I don't imagine him happy.

Owning something that was placed on you before you had a choice is not freedom.