Let me tell you about my life.. I was bullied from a young age, I was never one of those popular kids, i had hair cut short in a bob and very very thick glasses. Because of this I was bullied, moving didn’t help me, I was just bullied again in the new school or country. I was completely alone, my parents didn’t even notice, my identical twin sister was one of the bullies. When I was nine, I was hiking with my family on the Drakensburg mountains in South Africa and my sister had annoyed me for one reason or another and i found myself wishing that she would suffer from something small, for example a headache. I was walking ahead of my family messing around on the path, hiding from a couple who were hiking the same path. My sister started running to catch up to me. She slipped off the path where I had been messing around just moments before. She fell 5 metres off a cliff and landed on her head on a rock below. she was immediately concussed and knocked unconscious, breaking both her arms and cracking her skull open in the fall. My brother ran to get me to tell me what had happened, I didn’t believe him. The two stranger that I had been hiding from had friends in the air ambulance services, the man of the couple ran down the mountain to get reception to call them. Even then it took them 3 and a half hours to come to our aid and another half to land because it was difficult to land in the gorge. I spent 3 and a half hours watching my sister’s unconscious body bleeding, thinking that it was my fault that this had happened. It turns out that all she can remember from that 3 and a half hours is a slight headache. She was then airlifted out and myself and my mother waited in the gorge for the helicopter to pick up us after they took her to the ambulance. While she was in the helicopter, the paramedics injected the drip that was supposed to keep my sister alive into the wrong part of her arm, causing her arm to swell up from the fluids. We then rode in the ambulance to the hospital where the man supposedly in charge of looking after my little sister was too busy telling my mum about the other people he had saved to notice my sister choking on her own vomit. She was admitted into hospital where they discovered that she now ha permanent damage to the emotional part of her brain. I don’t precisely remember how long she was in hospital for, I only remember feeling jealous of all the attention she was getting, another emotional for which I suffered several years of guilt. I owe the life of my sister to the kindness of two total strangers. She was eventually released from hospital and started immediately improving. I however did not. I was traumatised from what had happened. I was on anti-depression and anxiety meds for a year afterwards. I would get nightmares about it. I would go into her room and just watch her sleep, just to know that she was ok. I would get flashbacks every time i saw something dead or fallen. The flashbacks never truly went away. from then i had always been very overprotective of my sister, but she didnt want me to be. nothing had changed. I continued to live in my sister’s shadow. A few weeks later my mum was admitted into hospital to have an operation on her spine as one of the disks in her neck had come out, it was quite a risky operation which had high chances of damaging her voice box leaving her mute. Cue more guilt. The operation was a success thankfully with no complications. Fast forward a few years, a new country a new school, no changes. Still being bullied but not for the same reasons. I was bullied because people wanted to bully me. I was still alone. New school again. Fast forwards to now. My grandpa has prostate cancer. My mother recently had a hysterectomy which I didnt know about until the day before her surgery because i had become that disjointed from my family. I have always been an A student, never getting in trouble, now ive been threatened to be suspended. I still have no friends. The one person in my life who gave me happiness has left, moved to a different country to pursue his career and now i don’t know what happens. My thirteen year old cousin has cancer of the spine and liver. She was taken to hospital and it was discovered when the cancer made half of her face go slack. She has to go through 7-9 months of chemo therapy and she has a 25% chance of survival at best. The doctors keep messing up her treatment, they’ve given her the wrong meds several times. All of this is dragging me so deep down into depression and there’s no one i can talk to. My parents have never connected with me. I honestly just dont know what to do.
