Imagine this. Imagine you are an oldest sibling, and you are a freak. You are a freak. You’ve been through shit, you’ve seen and heard shit that no one your age should ever have to, but you did it, and you came out the other side. Imagine you’re brash, and belligerent, and abrasive. Imagine you’re painfully childlike at times, imagine all those years of having to act the eldest, the protector, the parent, all those years of having to act like an adult were not yours, not yours to have and live, but only borrowed. Imagine that you will be paying the debt of an abandoned childhood for the rest of your life. Imagine you knew what it was like to have blood on your hands before you’d even hit puberty. Imagine you are full of rage, and all you can do is bottle it and bottle it and bottle it until the bottles begin to overflow, until the rage seeps into your being like poison, into your blood, your bones, so that when one of the bottles finally explodes, scattering hot sharp shards of glass, no one is surprised. No sympathy for you and your rage. You should have bottled it better. Screwed the caps on tight. Now you are always angry and then occasionally you are more angry. It is not a shock. It is all you are. You are an ugly, angry thing. You hurt people. You hurt people. And no one tries to understand because there has never been any allowances made for angry things. Angry things do not deserve allowances. Imagine, on top of all that, your brain doesn’t…work the same way other people’s does. Imagine that, out there in the world, your freakishness shines bright as a supernova through the cracks in that mask you wear. Imagine that everyone can see it, that it only takes a few moments for people to realise that there is something…different, about you. Imagine they blame you for it. You’re tactless, you’re reckless, you’re impulsive, you’re overprotective, you’re angry, you’re childish, you have to have everything fucking laid out for you, explained to you, you don’t understand, you can never sit still, you’re stumbling and you’re so fucking stupid, and — well. Imagine that you have a family. A family who you love more than anything else in the entire world. Imagine that they have been your priority your entire life, imagine that the more the outside world rejected you, the more you clung to them. Imagine they are the only place where you are safe. Imagine your family is fucked up, too. In different ways to you, but still, imagine you have more kinship with them, more understanding, than you do with the entire wide world. Imagine they are your everything. Everything to a freakish, angry thing. Imagine you would let all else burn to see them happy. Imagine they are all you have, and they hurt you, but it is a kind of hurt that you understand. That understands you. Imagine that that is more than you get from the rest of the universe.
Now imagine you are a younger sibling. Imagine you are…different. To your family. Imagine you spend your early years looking only at your family, and you feel like a freak. Alone. Outside. Imagine they are all the reference you have ever had, and so your differences are as stark as blood on snow, imagine you feel like a freak. A mistake. Imagine, sometimes, that you don’t feel a part of your family at all. Imagine, then, that you go out into the world, and…you’re good at it. You’re so good at it. You’re quick, and clever, and unexpectedly funny, and people like you. Imagine you realise for the first time that the way your family is is not the only way to be. Imagine you start to hate your family, just a little bit. To look down on them. To hold them on contempt. Imagine you look at your older sibling, your belligerent, angry, overprotective older sibling, and you begin to wonder what is wrong with them. You wonder why they are the way they are, why they don’t understand, why the people you encounter react so badly to how they are. You wonder why they make themselves out to be your parent, but act like a child. You wonder why they are oversensitive to certain things, and don’t notice others at all. You wonder why they never stop moving, fidgeting in their seat, twisting their fingers, flipping their lighter open and shut. Why they’re always humming, always drumming their fingers on something. You wonder why they take up so much fucking space, so much time, so much attention. You wonder why they have always been so incompatible with school. And you start to think that they’re stupid. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But imagine that you watch the way the world reacts to your older sibling — your older sibling, who fits in so well with your family — and you start to buy into it. Just a little. Because you are young, and clever, and capable of moving through the world with more ease than the rest of your family will ever manage. And because they made you feel like a freak. Them and their dysfunction, they made you feel like a freak. You are not a freak. You are just different to your family. More in tune with the rest of the world. The universe works for you. And you wonder why you spent all those years feeling like you were the odd one out. You see it now, how fucked up your family is. How different. How abrasive. How ignorant, how stupid. They don’t understand, you think, they don’t understand. They are in their own little bubble and they are sinking. They are fighting to keep afloat in this world but they are sinking. And they tried to drag you down with them, have been trying, will keep trying. Imagine you hate them, sometimes.
And now that you’ve imagined all that, tell me: what are you?
If you said Sam and Dean Winchester, you are correct.
If you said a parentified neurodivergent older sibling and a neurotypical younger sibling in a neurodivergent family, you are correct.
