Annoyances

I posted this on another site, too... But I want more opinions.

Alright, so this is really the only place that I can think of to post this - everywhere else, my brother and his girlfriend will see.

So about a year and a half ago, my brother decided that he was going to go into his second semester of his sophomore year with no family - he began lying to us about grades, hiding things from us, and cheating on his girlfriend. We have an understanding in my family - if you begin lying to us or move in with someone that you are romantically involved with, you are going to support yourself financially. We are NOT going to ditch you and never support you emotionally, but you're on your own financially. And that was totally understood by all parties. So he sacrificed this. So when all of this happened, in December of 2008, he stopped talking to him. In the year following, my parents send him HUNDREDS of emails, texts, and calls, trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on. No reply.

We found out about 6-8 months ago that he had deluded himself into believing that he had been ditched and that we didn't want anything to do with him. We wanted to talk to him, we wanted to know what was going on - my family has always been, and will always be one of the most important things in my life, and one of the most close and intimate families I know. We talk about everything openly and do not keep many secrets (obviously, they don't know about this site.... that would be weird). But we are very open - such as they know that I'm bi, and know about almost all of my relationships and friends. Not the type of family that Lindsay described in her blog post (see http://linzabee.blogspot.com/2010/02/warning-pukeworthy-material.html). However, in the past 6 months, we've been getting better, seeing him about 1ce a month, getting emails and a phone call about once a week, and learning about each other again - my parents say that if he hadn't reconnected with us when he did, and he had just seen me on the street and held a conversation with me, he wouldn't recognise me. And that's probably true. I've changed so much in the past two years. I've grown up, as one may say.

Seeing this blog post brought back everything and was a huge blow to my parents and I - we genuinely thought that things were turning around, that we were finally going to get back to being the family that we used to be - the family that I knew when we used to take vacations to national parks, the brother that was my best friend and protector. He didn't understand it - he'd taken my big brother from me. He didn't know who he was to me, and now it was like they took him away from me again.

I genuinely don't know if I'll ever be close with my brother again, or if our family can recover from this blow. In the past four years, the shit has hit the fan. Both my grandmothers have died, my brother disowned us, I got into a car wreck, had multiple mental break-downs, my grandfather got married AGAIN, and oh, by the way, Graduation. I'm going to Kenya in a couple months. Can something else major NOT happen?

Fuck life. I love you all, but honestly? Fuck life.