218: What if the family glue came undone?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I was completely paralyzed in my body. Is this really happening? Like, is this really my reality? And I'm questioning myself as to whether or not I was crazy. And had I really seen what I just saw? From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 218. What if the family glue came undone?

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My parents met when my mom was 18 and my dad was 19. They got married and they immediately started having children.

So they immediately had my brother, then my sister came shortly after that, and then me, and then my little brother. So there were four of us growing up with two parents who were constantly working very, very hard to keep us happy and healthy. And I know that it was hard for them because they weren't college educated, and I think that they struggled a lot.

When we were little, we practiced Catholicism. I remember us just running around every Sunday morning. My mom just, it wasn't even enjoyable. It was like just running around trying to get ready to put on this sort of facade of being this family that's put together together.

My grandparents were also like very strict Catholics. So my mom was always sort of under their thumb her whole life. Those unwritten expectations or unwritten rules about how you need to behave as a daughter and how you need to raise your children changed.

I just remember my mom always sort of having connection issues. She couldn't connect to us because she was always so busy just trying to like keep up with the household and make sure that the bills were being paid. And I also remember my dad would come home and we had to wait to talk to him until he had a beer or several beers.

My older brother and my sister were very athletic and very into sports. I also remember constantly being told that I was not athletic. I was uncoordinated. I was skinny. I was the cute one. That was sort of disorienting for me. I think looking back because I didn't really know my place in the world.

I think to be raised in such a traditional household, it just felt like this is how life is. This is how it's going to go. We're living in this little bubble in this suburban community, and it just never felt right.

I also remember like sitting in church and my instincts were telling me like, this isn't right. Like, I don't feel connected to Jesus. I don't feel connected to God in this way. And I'm missing something. There's something wrong with me because I don't connect to this. Like the story didn't make sense to me.

And then I was also like expected to kind of just stay in line as to what my parents wanted for me. I think that's how everyone was. That's why we were raised in that community was to keep out anything that could be dangerous, any sort of reality.

There was a lot of disconnection with my parents growing up. I think because they were a little bit in survival mode, I remember going to sit on my mom's lap and she would say, you're too skinny and too bony and it hurts my lap. Don't sit in my lap. But it came across to me like she couldn't stand me, like she couldn't stand being around me. She didn't want anything to do with me. And I think a lot of it was

Her inability to connect emotionally or connect at all to her children in a way that wasn't about providing for them food and shelter. The lovey-dovey hugs, that did not happen in my house. It just wasn't that way.

She was just a teenager herself trying to raise a child and then having another child and another child. So she never really got that opportunity to find out who she was and to, you know, identify who she was as a person in the world. My mom and I were a lot alike. And I think that always bothered my mom about me and why it was so hard for my mom to connect to me because I was a mirror image of her and she didn't want to see it.

She didn't want to see me go down the path that she was on. She didn't want me to be like her. I was the brat in the family. I was sarcastic. I love to make people laugh, and I still do. I just think that was my way of getting attention in any way that I could from the adults in my life. You know, I shared a room with my sister from the time that I can remember. We shared a bedroom, and then my brother shared a bedroom. She was kind of the glue for the four of us.

My sister was absolutely amazing. She had a huge group of friends. Everybody loved my sister. They absolutely loved her. And I'm not just saying that like she was just this magnet. She just had the spark and people were attracted to her in a way that I have still never seen with another person in my life.

One time, my older brother, who was in junior high, was having problems with this kid on the way home from school. And then at one point, he had beat up my brother on the way home from school. So then my brother comes home and says, you know, this kid beat me up. And my mom just kind of, oh, kids will be kids again.

A couple days later, this kid's mom showed up at our front door and she is so mad. And she says, look at my son. Your son beat up my son. And my mom is standing there and she's like, you beat up this little boy on the way home from school? And my sister jumps up off the couch and she goes, no, I did.

She was like the protector. She would just go and do things without permission and without any regard for what other people were going to think about her. She didn't care. She just had this great confidence and we could fight like cats and dogs. But at the end of the day, my sister wanted us all to be okay.

My sister was going into her freshman year of high school. We had a choice of four Catholic schools that we were allowed to go to, and she chose one of the co-ed schools. We were still sharing a room, and then her sophomore year of high school, she started coming home and saying that the gym teacher was messing with her and that he was saying things to her. And it wasn't ever any sort of physical abuse or anything like that.

It was that he's looking at her strange and he doesn't want me at the school anymore. I know it. I know he doesn't want me there anymore. And she was almost like obsessed over the way this gym teacher was treating her and the way that she was catching on to it. But he was so good at what he did that no one else noticed or was on her side about it.

At the time that she was telling me that these things were going on, I was feeling very righteous and very protective of her. Like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening to you. And my sister had every right to be upset. So she thought it was going to solve all of her problems to transfer to this all-girls high school.

So up to this point, I thought, okay, I'm going to go to the school that my brother and sister attended and went to. I was just going to follow in their footsteps. And now all of a sudden, it put me in a position of, do I go to this other school where now my sister isn't there? Or do I go to this all-girls school where I don't really want to go, but my sister is there? So I ended up going to the all-girls school with my sister.

Because that's what I thought I was supposed to do and what a good sister and a good daughter should do. The all-girls school was in one of the richest communities. And all these girls were really rich. And I had a really hard time connecting to them. My sister, of course, immediately made a ton of friends. She's already on the basketball team. She's playing soccer. And this was her junior year.

I know that she was like out drinking every weekend and smoking weed. And then she went to a party and the party gets busted by the cops. And then, of course, the school gets this phone call that my sister had been busted at this party for underage drinking. So they kicked her off the basketball team and she was just absolutely devastated. It just seemed like things were catching up to her.

When I was 16, I had a boyfriend that I had had for about a year and we had started having sex and we weren't using protection and I got pregnant. That next morning after I found out I was pregnant, I just woke up hysterical and I go across the room and I shake my sister and I said, I don't know what to do. I was scared out of my mind. I'm freaking out. I don't know what I'm going to tell mom and dad.

So she sits up and she's like, it's going to be okay. And she just held me and I cried. And she never passed any sort of judgment on me for that. She just was there for me, you know, even though I was scared out of my mind and I knew that I had made some huge mistakes.

Later that day, she said, "You gotta tell mom and dad," you know, and she sort of coached me through it. And my parents just flipped out. My dad started throwing stuff, "I'm gonna kill that guy." My mom was just hysterical, crying, sobbing in the corner, couldn't believe it, yelling at me. How could I do this to them? Like it was me doing something to them. I ended up having an abortion.

My parents were so hellbent on teaching me a lesson from this and giving me the silent treatment for months on end because of what I had done. And my sister was just checking in with me all the time, just like, are you okay? And she knew that I was sad and depressed and disappointed in myself in a way that no one else knew.

I remember my friend staying the night and my sister was telling us this story about how she had gone to this amusement park with a group of her friends. She got separated from her group. And so she was walking around and riding the roller coasters by herself, which just didn't sound like my sister at all. And she said when she was in line, she had this sort of experience where she saw this guy with butterfly stickers all over his hair.

And he had a shirt on that looked like clouds. And she said the clouds looked like they were moving. She saw this man in line with her and he kept looking at her and staring at her and like smiling. And she said it was a really positive experience, like he was just this beautiful person. But she knew that she was the only one that could see him.

She almost made it sound like this sort of ghost story, but it was like a positive ghost story interaction that she had with this ghost. And I just remember my friend like, oh, my gosh, that's so cool. That's amazing. And I'm just sitting there looking at my sister like this is really strange and not like her at all to be telling this story or even having a story like this.

And I remember my gut just telling me something wasn't right. I could just tell it wasn't my sister. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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One time she called home hysterically crying and she would say, I'm sitting here trying to study and people are walking past my room and they're all pointing and laughing at me. And the resident advisor down the hall is getting on the PA system and spreading rumors about me and making jokes about me, telling people that, you know, I'm this horrible person and I'm stupid.

And I said to my sister, you don't have a PA system in your room. And she said, oh, there's one hidden. And I said, no, there's not. And it was just completely bizarre. At one point, she called my brother in the middle of the night and told him, crying hysterically, that she knew that she had AIDS and that she was going to die and she was scared.

My brother was hysterical and then she like hung up the phone and said I gotta go and my brother's crying and he's all worried and he's calling my parents. He's worried that my sister's gonna do something to herself, like hurt herself. She calls him back like 15 minutes later completely calm, cool, and collected and says you know I was joking right? I was just kidding.

She came home at Christmas time and my parents went to pick her up from the university and bring her back home. And they said that they stopped for something to eat on the way home.

They were sitting at a restaurant and my mom said she was trying to talk to my sister. My sister started hysterically laughing. She's staring at this group of people over at this table. And then she starts getting angry. And my mom is like, what's wrong? And my sister said those people over there were like laughing and joking with me with their minds. But now they're making fun of me. And now I'm mad.

And my mom looks over at this table and these people were just engaged in a conversation by themselves. They weren't looking at my sister. They weren't even looking at her. I think that's when my mom realized like something's really wrong. Like she is delusional and hallucinating about what is going on in her world.

It was decided over that Christmas break that she needed to take a break for the next semester and stay home and go into the mental health unit at the local hospital.

So she is in the psych ward. She's 18, about to turn 19. She's dropped out of college. And I am still not convinced that there's anything wrong. Like she had called at home and said a couple strange things to me, but she would always keep it together for me long enough that I didn't see it. I didn't see it the way everyone else was seeing it.

So I was still sort of convinced that it wasn't as bad as everyone was saying it was. She agreed to it, but she was not happy about it. She didn't feel like it was where she needed to be or that there was anything wrong with her. She was convinced that it was everybody else and not her.

She was mad at my parents, so she only put me on the list as who was allowed to visit. My brothers weren't allowed to visit. My parents weren't allowed to visit. I was the only one allowed to visit. So my parents came to me and said, you're the only one on the list that's allowed to go see her, and we need you to go in there and check on her.

So now I'm in this position. I'm a senior in high school, supposed to be having the time of my life, right? And now I'm suddenly going to this hospital and having to get buzzed in so that I can visit with my sister and then report back to my parents.

It was just really confusing because I wanted to please my parents and I wanted to obey them and be respectful of them. But I also felt protective of my sister, you know, as somebody who was my best friend and always looked out for my best interest and take care of her in a way that she always helped take care of me.

That winter, she was in and out of the mental hospital. I think that they were sort of testing out different medications on her. It seemed like she just slept for days, and then other times she seemed completely, like, restless, agitated, emotional. I think, too, I was so naive to think that anything bad could happen to anybody that I loved.

I never imagined ever, ever, ever that anything this devastating could happen to somebody in my life. The first time I really knew that my sister was sick, I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard her talking. And I kind of sat up in bed just a little bit and I lift my head up and I look over the sheets because I can hear my sister's voice and I hear her talking to somebody in the room.

And I look up and I look across the room and she is sitting straight up in bed and she's facing the wall. So I can see this profile view of her and I'm just looking at her and she is just having this full blown conversation, but there's nobody there. There's absolutely nobody there.

I'm sitting there watching her and she doesn't know I'm awake. And she suddenly out of the corner of her eye realizes that I'm there. And she just darted her eyes at me. Her eyes looked black as night to me. It was not my sister. And she said, what are you looking at?

It was the scariest look anybody had ever given me. Those words, what are you looking at? Let me know right then and there that my sister was definitely not okay and that she was not going to be okay for a long time, if ever. I was completely paralyzed in my body.

Is this really happening? Like, is this really my reality? And I'm questioning myself as to whether or not I was crazy. Am I hallucinating? Am I seeing things? And had I really seen what I just saw? Okay, I see it now. This is what everyone's been talking about.

And I didn't tell anybody about that for years because it was that terrifying. Just the look that she gave me and the words that she said, it just completely terrified me into silence.

The fear I felt in that moment, it was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I mean, I'm raised in this little bubble. I'm just going through the motions. That was my identity up to that point, right? So now I'm suddenly left in this position with the person who I thought I knew best. And now I'm feeling completely terrified of them in an instant for years.

17 years of my life, she was my person. She was the person I went to with everything. She was the person I looked up to. It felt like she was just completely ripped away.

The disorientation that occurred went on for months because I did not have my own sort of identity up until this point. I remember being like, if my sister isn't a part of my identity or she's not going to show me what my identity needs to be, then who even am I? Why am I even here? What is the purpose of all of this? I remember feeling a lot of guilt that it wasn't me.

Because I felt so worthless as a person that I just wanted to take that away from my family. Like, I just wanted it to be me. That was sick because I was the weak one. I was the one who wasn't strong. I was the one who didn't really have any purpose in life. And I just wanted it to be me. I wanted to take it away from her. And I wanted my parents to have the daughter that they wanted back.

which was my sister. She's the light in my parents' eyes. So why is this happening to her and not me? I'm the one who's been a giant disappointment. So why is this happening to her and not me?

And I remember like trying to use drugs and alcohols to try to feel crazy or try to feel like I was literally going to like drink my way into her situation to take away her illness and take away her sickness and her state of being and trying to like physically put it on myself so that I could be the one that was sick and not her.

For a few months after that moment, I just felt very shocked and confused and sort of disoriented about what had happened. And moving forward, things started to get worse.

My sister was in and out of a mental hospital, so I had to continue to be the person that went into the mental hospital to see my sister. And I always wanted to make sure that I was being really kind while I was in there because I was afraid that if I wasn't or if I questioned her in any way, even though I was suspecting things were really taking a turn for the worse, that if I didn't sort of keep her on my side and appease her, that she would then take me off the list.

which would disappoint my parents, which would not give me any sort of connection to her. And I would ruin it for everybody else. Like it felt like a lot of pressure. I would come out of the mental hospital and have to immediately sort of report back to my parents. Like they were just like, how is she? What happened? What exactly was said? And it was never like, are you okay? Is this okay with you?

Of course, I was going to do that for my sister and with my sister and for my parents because that's what needed to happen. And I was happy to step into that role. But I also think it was affecting me in ways that like I couldn't even see myself.

I think my sense of self-worth has always been pretty low my whole life. I don't know that I was seen or heard at all growing up and only started to feel seen and heard when I was able to help navigate a world of mental illness for my parents so that they could help their other daughter.

you know, that winter I was about 17 in my senior year of high school. And so she was in and out of the mental hospital. Like she was just going to do what she was going to do. She was playing really loud music in the middle of the night, drinking and stepping outside to smoke cigarettes every other minute. But then other times it was like her medication was affecting her. And so then she would like sleep for days.

I just remember during that time period waking up one time and I hear my sister and my dad yelling and my mom crying. I go downstairs and I'm a little disoriented just because I just woke up and I look down the short set of stairs and like my mom is sitting on that landing in a ball holding her stomach, just hysterically crying. And I said, what's going on? And she couldn't even answer me.

So I go further down the stairs and my dad is on top of my sister. He has her arms pinned down. She's screaming and spitting in his face, like screaming profanities, telling him to get off of her. I look closer and I realize that she has a butcher knife in her hand.

I'm just standing there in complete shock. And I'm like, you know, what is going on? And they're yelling, go to bed, go to bed. My mom and dad are just yelling at me to go back to my room because my parents are like trying to keep me in this bubble still. They don't want me to see any of this. And they're still trying to protect me a little bit, I think. So I obeyed them and I go back up to my room and I shut the door and I'm, of course, crying myself to sleep.

How am I supposed to just ignore this? I mean, this is just crazy. I think I remember having like a brief conversation with my mom the next day and she said something about like my sister had gone after my mom with the knife and my dad pinned her down to the ground. Obviously they got the knife away from her and she didn't attack my mom, but like she had tried. So now I'm left with this image of like, okay, my sister could be harmful to people or to me and I share a room with her still.

I think that night they called rescue crisis. Rescue crisis would come to our house every now and then. And my sister had to answer like 10 questions. Like, are you suicidal? Are you thinking about hurting yourself? But she would look at my parents and with a smug look on her face and say no. It was like she knew how to play the system and they wouldn't take her beyond her own will if she answered no to one of the questions. And it would just drive my parents crazy.

Then she started in with my dad. She's convinced that my dad is on the internet and he is evil and he's spreading lies about my sister. He was like psychically attacking her and also literally attacking her online. The day I was supposed to graduate high school, I thought it would have all been worth it if my sister could go to my high school graduation because she had missed some events up until that point because of her mental health issues.

Woke up that day, got myself ready, and I really had it in my head like, she better be there. Like, she needs to go to my graduation. She was trying to get herself ready, and she could not get herself together. I went into our room at one point to kind of check on her and see if she was ready yet. And she just looked at me and just plopped down on the bed. And she's like, I just can't do it. I can't go.

I can tell you want me to go, but I just cannot go. And I cried the rest of the day all through graduation, sobbed because I knew like if she couldn't be there for me, like this was all for nothing. Like it just felt like everything was all for nothing. I had gone to this high school that she wanted me to go to for nothing. My sister could not show up for me because she had always shown up for me.

The summer after my senior year just kept getting worse and worse and worse because she doesn't want to take medication or she's skipping medication that she's supposed to be taking. But we're still sharing a room and I would go out with my friends and I would come home and our room would just be completely destroyed.

My CDs were out of the cases. My bed was torn apart. Sheets were taken off. Mattress flipped. Just completely destroyed. And it was always like she was looking for something or she said that the music that I had was evil.

So I'm starting to get frustrated and angry. And like her response to that was then to just turn on me and start telling me that I'm the evil one and I'm just as bad as my parents and I'm nothing but an abortion queen.

And that still to this day, like just levels me because I had put so much trust in her at the moment, you know, and now she's like using that against me and making it like I was really evil because of what I had done.

She was, you know, in support of it and said, whatever you decide to do, I'm here for you. And now she was like using that against me to just be mean and vicious. So now I'm left with nobody. I mean, now I'm like, I really don't have my sister. I don't have anybody, you know, and my anger is starting to come out and I'm getting frustrated.

My freshman year of college was probably one of the worst, most traumatic experiences because I was just starting off at college and my sister had been diagnosed at that point with schizophrenia.

I start college, she's like ransacking my room and going through my things. So I decided to leave and move out with my boyfriend at the time, who I wasn't extremely close with, but I needed to get out of there. I need to go live my life a little bit.

So we get an apartment. We're having fun. Everything's going well. My mom calls me and says, I really want to take this class on schizophrenia and bipolar depression. And I really want you to be the one that goes with me. And in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, this is going to finally bring me closer to my mom.

Every single class that I went to, it was just one devastating blow after the other as far as giving us information about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, all of the devastating effects and symptoms and like everything that came with it. And I remember like just feeling completely drained and crying and crying and crying for hours, just like knowing my sister's fate.

I thought it was going to answer a lot of my questions and make me feel less confused and like make sense of everything that was going on. Teach me ways that I could help her show me how everything was going to get better. And, and it just, it didn't do any of that. It just proved more and more and more like how absolutely devastating it was going to be for our family. Yeah.

And just helping me realize that my sister was literally never going to be the same. And she was never going to come back to me. In that moment that I woke up in the middle of the night and looked at her two years earlier, I realized that was the moment I lost her. And these last two years, I've just been in denial of that. I was never going to get her back the way that she was before that moment.

Once I started realizing like my sister was just never going to be the same person that she was before, I started to really like grieve her as I had known her before. And I started to just imagine her funeral.

I started to imagine every detail of her funeral from what she was wearing in her casket to the flowers to people that were going to be at her funeral and showing up for her. The eulogy I would give.

Every single little last detail of her funeral, like, would just play over and over in my mind. And I think that I needed to have a funeral for her. I needed that. And that's something that families who go through this never get.

They're seeing a shell of a person that they once knew, and they're never going to get that person back again, but they never get to grieve them properly because it's still that person, but it's not.

There's just this silent, unknown world of families and siblings and parents and grandparents and children that are like grieving for these people that they know that are dealing with mental health issues and whose families are destroyed by a mental illness.

They don't get to grieve that person. They just have to carry on and survive and continue to try to help them. We don't know how. We don't know how. I can't uninvolve myself with my sister's life because she's somebody that I love and who I'm extremely close to. And I'm not just going to walk away from that. I can't walk away from that. And so this was something that was just going to be devastating and overwhelming for the rest of my life.

I was never going to have control over it. I was silly to think that I could. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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My dad at this point is like at the height of his career. So his response to a lot of this was to work more. And he ends up like on this president's club at his job for his sales and he

They say, we want to fly you out to Hawaii for this awards ceremony. And my sister is like in the throes of a mental health crisis. And my parents are being invited to Hawaii and they were like, you know, should we go or should we not go? And I was like, no, we're not going.

I was like, you can go. I'll help take care of her. Everything will be fine. So my parents decide they're going to go and I'm going to be home to keep an eye on my sister. I'm like getting ready for work one morning and I come downstairs and she's got like pots and pans behind her back. I'm like, what are you doing? And she's like, nothing. What do you mean? At this point, this is like normal behavior for her. So I'm like, okay, what is she up to?

Well, then I realized she's like taking pots and pans or silverware like one at a time instead of like boxes. She's taking them down the street to a U-Haul. She had bought a U-Haul like on my dad's credit card while they were in Hawaii. And she was packing up the U-Haul to move back down to Cincinnati to like where her university was, even though she wasn't in school at that point anymore.

I called my brother and I said, you got to get over here. Like she's packing up a U-Haul like she's leaving. We can't let her leave. Mom and dad aren't here. You know, my brother comes over and I was like, I have to go to work. And I left to go to work. I just couldn't do it anymore. I was like, she's all yours.

When I got back, my aunt calls me and she said, your brother got arrested because your sister accused him of trying to physically like stop her, assault her when she was trying to move and she's over 18. They were like, you have to let her go. And my brother's like, no, she's not leaving. And my sister was like, he's trying to assault me so I can't leave.

So they arrested my brother and took him downtown. And my sister took off in the U-Haul and moved to Cincinnati at that point. This all happened like with her kind of under my care. So I just have always carried a lot of guilt from that. While she was down living three hours away from me, after she had sort of run away, I would go down and try to check on her periodically. Like when I was just like, I couldn't stand not knowing how she was doing.

My parents had been moving her in and out of apartments while she was down there because she would like get evicted for destroying apartments because she couldn't care for herself or anything around her. And one time I like went down...

She said she was going to be at her apartment and I would drive all the way down there, like believing that she was going to be home and then like get there and she wasn't there. And I would just sit there for like hours in this parking lot or like a driveway where she was living and she just wouldn't show up and I'd have to turn around and like drive back home. As we got older, like I had four children and my sister had three while she was down in Cincinnati.

And she was living with her boyfriend, the father of her children. And he had a lot of mental health issues. And he ended up leaving one day. He said, I'm going to work. And he just left and never came back. I got really close with my grandma. I can say that she was my saving grace. Looking back, I think she saved my life. She saw me. She saw me for who I was.

She loved me unconditionally. She helped me almost every single day, either with a phone call or with dinner or helping me with the kids or painting a wall in my house. She was just absolutely amazing.

Unfortunately, she passed away after I had my fourth baby. She died and then my sister decided to move back to her hometown into my parents' house that they still owned, that we grew up in. When she moved back home with three of her kids, and I think she thought that we were going to pick up where we left off.

So I was kind of excited thinking my sister and I are going to get to reestablish this relationship because she had been doing a lot better since then. Like when she had started having kids, she was actually doing a lot better. But I wasn't her little sister anymore. It was a woman with four children of her own. And I think that that bothered her. And I think that it was hard for her to see that I had moved on without her. And she started treating me really poorly, to be honest.

She still wasn't really taking care of herself. And I felt this huge obligation to let her treat me poorly because she had children and I didn't want to hinder any sort of relationship that I had with them. I didn't want to hinder a relationship that they had with my children. And I didn't want to throw away any sort of second chance that I was going to have with my sister.

And I felt like it was all on my shoulders to keep it together, even though she was treating me really poorly. It just became very emotionally abusive and manipulative because she was doing a lot of self-medicating still and not really taking care of herself the way that she should be, not really taking her meds consistently.

And she and her friend called me after they had been drinking, left me a horrible voice message, cussing me out, calling me every name in the book, telling me that they were going to kick my ass. And it scared me. It really scared me. I didn't know if she was outside my house. I didn't know if she was at home. I didn't know where her children were. I went and locked my doors. I was completely freaked out.

The next day, she didn't remember any of it. And I was so mad. I was just so angry. And I remember thinking, enough is enough. Whether you remember it or not, this happened. I have small children in my house to take care of. I can't do this anymore. I just could not be around her anymore. I just decided I can't be around this person anymore if this is the way she's going to treat me.

It was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do because I had the second chance with her. And it was like I was the one choosing to kind of throw it away.

I had to focus on myself in a way that I had never done so before. I had always put so much focus on my sister being well and her children being okay. And I had gotten so far away from myself and I didn't know who I was anymore if I had ever known who I was.

Setting those boundaries, I didn't have anybody else to answer to but myself at that point. For the first time, it felt like I didn't have anybody else to rescue but myself. And I didn't know that I was worth it or if I was worth it.

I started to actually physically go running. That helped a lot, just being in that meditative space and figuring things out, like out on a trail and in the woods. That really, really helped. And also like starting to read books about like spirituality and self-help books to where I could make sense of everything.

Anytime that I can practice meditation or when I go out running by myself, that's a great time and a great space to be able to connect to who I am and what I need and really think about my feelings in a way that I wasn't allowed to when I was younger. I think that started when I put boundaries up with my sister, when I said, you can't treat me this way anymore.

It's helped me just show up for myself with my own kids and let them know what my boundaries are with them and with my husband and with everybody. You know, it's okay. It's not going to be the end of the world if I say no.

It kind of lit a fire under me to establish a teaching career. I got my teaching license and then started teaching and then decided just a couple years ago to really finish my master's and like go back while my family was there. And my parents were young parents. They didn't graduate college. And now I'm rewriting that for myself and my family. That was around the same time that I decided, you know, I'm not Catholic. I don't want to be a part of this.

With my mom, I started to kind of voice things with her and not let her manipulate me or not be the pushover that I had always been my whole life. Trying to find a sense of yourself after a lifetime of not doing so, it's something that I'm still struggling with and I'm still working on.

I think that the first thing that helped was stepping into a therapist's office for the first time, you know, telling her my story and having her say, you have PTSD. This is okay that you're feeling this way. And having somebody confirm that I wasn't crazy and that what I was feeling was valid.

Having someone validate that opens the door for yourself to say, okay, I have these feelings. Why do I have these feelings? Do I want to have these feelings? How can I change it if I don't want this? I think it's something that I'm always working on still. I have to check in with myself daily. You know, who do I want to be today?

And I have to remind myself of who I am and what I want. It's not easy. Establishing boundaries with my sister actually made my relationship with her much better because she realized, okay, if I want this person in my life, I have to get along, you know, and I have to also like be kind and be nice.

And I also think that I taught her because at that point, like her self-esteem had taken such a plunge and she has such a hard time now knowing who she is. I now get to show her those ways that she can show up for herself. When my sister would share things with me that were so far from reality or the truth, I think my first response was always, that's not true.

That's not how it happened. And her reaction was to always shut down, almost like she couldn't trust me with what she was sharing with me anymore. And that in turn, I think actually affected my self-esteem and my sense of my ability to help her because I wasn't helping her the way that she needed to be helped. Over time, I learned to just say, that's not how I remember it.

And I feel like that was more helpful because I wasn't telling her what her truth or reality was, but I was showing her a way to question her own reality instead of completely negating her experiences, which in her mind were completely real and true.

I think the hardest piece in dealing with my sister was not being able to fix it, not having any control over how she was going to live her life and what she wanted for herself. And to realize that even though she's mentally ill, she's still a human being and she has thoughts and feelings of her own. And I have to respect that, but not let her take advantage of me either.

I'm still constantly questioning myself and whether or not I should put my feelings and thoughts aside for her because of what she has been through and because of what she is dealing with and has dealt with. I think I'm always questioning, like, how much of myself am I willing to compromise for this other person?

Of course, you are this person's family, but at what point are you not tied to them anymore because of how much they are traumatizing you? At what point do you not feel obligated anymore? Where does the obligation start and stop?

I'm to the point too where I'm like, I'm really, truly grateful for everything that's happened with my sister because not that I'm grateful that she's sick or that she's ill, none of that. I would never want that for her.

But it has shaped who I am and it's made me more empathetic and it's made me who I am today. And I can say that I would not change that. You know, I can be really grateful for things now in my life, small things, big things. You know, even when I'm in a negative space in my head, I can maybe look up at the sky and see clouds and just say thank you for that moment and for that beauty.

and find the beauty in the things that are devastating and ugly and hard to deal with.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at actuallyhappening.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

You know, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.