steepholm

Have you ever watched Ginger Snaps?

Something about this entry (and I suppose the other entry it's in response to) really got to me, but it's hard to say what, or if it's even really appropriate for me to use your comment space as a venue to vent about my own personal issues. I mean, obviously, in part, it's this kind of sense that the complaint about Susan, and the complaint about Zach and Alice kalimac quotes from Doll Bones, are purely age-related - because the quotation from Doll Bones really resonated with me, and I'm the older sibling. But of course that's not quite fair. Yes, my brother and I (and our other friend, my brother's classmate) had various secondary world shared fantasies together when we were young. And yes, we don't live in those shared fantasies anymore, even though we did until fairly late in life - the one that was just my brother and I, without our other friend, went on until I was in my mid or even late-twenties, if only fairly sporadically. And yes, this is a source of sorrow and pain for me - there is a sense in which playing these games was the single most rewarding thing I ever did in my entire life, and the fact that I don't do it anymore is one of the biggest losses of adulthood. I think it's very true that the experience of playing them is kind of fundamental to my personal philosophy of life, that most of what I think about the meaning of life is tied to what those games were for me. But I don't have the feeling that there's a single person to blame for it, or, at least, I don't think I was the one to pull away or my brother was the one to pull away - if anything, it was mostly logistics which got in the way. We didn't prioritize the imaginary games as the only important things in our lives, so, even if they were the most important, the combined weight of all the other important things, for both of us, got in the way.

I guess I am bothered, both with Susan and with the way that the protagonist of Doll Bones frames her complaint, with the linking of the loss of this shared imaginary world with a specifically sexual or romantic maturity - I never entered that world, myself, and my brother entered it at the age of fourteen, which was actually at least a year before we deviated from our original intense closeness. I do feel, on some level, intensely betrayed by my brother for pulling out of our closeness (something, however, that isn't well-linked to the death of our shared world), and it's hard not to link that to his romantic relationships, but, if I'm being honest, I can't help but suspect that he feels I pulled out of our closeness first. In the last year of the peak of our relationship, when he was fourteen and I was seventeen, he had a lot of other friends and, as important as our bond was to him, it was quite clearly not the only important bond with his peers in his life - for me at seventeen, I had barely any friends, and didn't particularly respect most of the ones I did theoretically have - when I went to college, still keeping up the intensity of my connection to my brother in my heart, and finally found other people who really spoke to me, did that leave my brother feeling bereft of a devotion that had previously been directed only at him? I worry that it did, even as I feel like it's unfair on some level if my brother really did resent me or pull away from me for having a life outside of him when he had never had a life restricted only to me. These issues are too intense; my relationship today with my brother is much better than it has been in the past, but I still can't possibly ask him what he thinks happened to our original relationship because I can't imagine that he would feel comfortable being asked that, much as I wish I knew.

ETA: if you do feel this is not the appropriate space for my personal rants, just let me know, and I'll delete it.