Hello!
Welcome to the WellSpace blog — where all things siblings, families, and physical and mental health conditions live. You may have already perused the About page which offers up a small snapshot of the ‘why’ behind my work. With this first post, I am inviting you to soak up a fuller, more life-sized understanding of why I do what I do.
I identify as many things: I am a mother, a daughter, a sister, and an auntie. I am a wife and best friend. I am a retired varsity athlete. And I am a researcher, counsellor, and social worker. Among these identities is one that did not come quite so easily nor comfortably for me. I am a ‘well’ sibling of an eating disorder survivor, and this has taken me years to not only identify with but to accept with courage and even gratitude.
My sister is nearly two years older than me and, growing up, we were thought to be twins. We looked the same, dressed the same, and did many of the same activities; and we progressed through most of our childhood and pre-teen years this way. My sister was an avid and spectacular dancer growing up and she was, and still is, an incredible academic which I envied her for because what I had to work so diligently to achieve all appeared to come so easily to her. She belonged to the ‘popular’ group in school, yet she was and still is largely introverted.
By the time my sister was 15-years-old, Anorexia had crept in and held quite a grip on her life. I was 13-years-old at this time, and Anorexia did not sit within my realm of understanding. Our two eldest siblings had moved out of our family home, leaving my sister, myself, and our frightened parents to navigate these turbulent and muddy waters together. In this critical phase of my development, I shared a bedroom wall, a bathroom, a kitchen, car rides, and the same high school with Anorexia. Whatever my sister did, Anorexia was there. This is how my developing brain perceived the things that were happening around me.
I saw my sister as Anorexia and, at this time, I wasn’t able to see her as having a relationship with Anorexia because I wasn’t given the avenue nor the insight to think about and externalize the illness in this way. To me, Anorexia wasn’t just this *little person sitting atop my sister’s shoulder* but, rather, had seeped into her bones and had consumed everything about her. She was no longer the sister that I knew — and this was partially true, because Anorexia had drastically influenced her mannerisms, personality, and demeanour. This makes sense to me now: because her body and her brain were quite literally starving to death, and she was both winning and losing at her efforts for self-control and perfection as Anorexia took over. I saw my sister as Anorexia and, during much of her 7-year battle with the illness, this prevented me from seeing any other parts of her.
I was 13 at Anorexia’s onset and about 20-years-old by the time my sister had freed herself from its grasp. During this 7-year period, I was perceived to be “thriving” by our Western ideal of the word — I was doing well in school, participating in high levels of sport, and maintaining positive peer connections. Yet, my home life was suffering, and I succeeded at becoming a stranger to my sister despite sharing our most intimate environments. I didn’t talk to my parents much either and, looking back, I think it was because I was just so hurt that they couldn’t see how much I was hurting — how much I was being hurt by Anorexia. Or maybe they could and just didn’t know what to do or how to help because they were so profoundly consumed by Anorexia that I looked like a shining star sitting next to it.
Though, if you had asked them to tell you how I was feeling, they might have said something like: “She just seems so angry all of the time.” They didn’t have the education or awareness to understand that my anger sat atop a slew of other emotions like confusion, resentment, sadness, fear, rejection — you name it. This sincere misunderstanding and lack of attention toward my troubled experience alongside Anorexia led me to face profound distress, confusion, and isolation as a growing teenager and young adult. Surrounded by a full, attentive, and loving family, I felt alone.
Following my sister’s recovery, I was talking with my own counsellor about how my parents didn’t care for my emotional needs as a sibling living alongside Anorexia. It was at this time that I said to her: “Well, I don’t really blame them because they were so frightened by Anorexia and were doing everything that they could to stop it. She was dying, after all.”
And then my counsellor said to me:“When you excuse your parents from the responsibility of giving you what you needed as a child, you deny yourself the right to feel all of the emotions connected to that experience.” And when she said this to me, I responded with a long *sigh* because she was right.
By saying that my parents ‘couldn’t help it’, I wasn’t honouring my feelings of resentment, rejection, and fear for how they didn’t support me as a young person so closely exposed to Anorexia’s wrath. My counsellor gave me permission to feel all sorts of emotions connected to this experience as a way to honour the young person in me who wasn’t really given the space to feel these things for so many years. Now, she cautioned me not to hang out in this place for too long — because I did not want to live there. However, it was important that I allowed myself to sit in these emotions for a while.
In my experience as a ‘well’ sibling, I am driven to use my insider-knowledge in preventing my story from being replicated — to support other ‘well’ siblings and loved ones facing this experience; to raise awareness over the critical lack of sibling-specific mental health services in our city (and beyond); and to begin filling this crucial gap in care.
While not my whole story, this is the ‘nuts and bolts’ of my ‘why’. Like, comment, share — I want to hear from you.
In Sibling Solidarity,
— W.
