what we carry, where we’re headed - 8/4/22

(been sitting in the draft for months. with my uncle in the hospital this week. ended up thinking about this one a lot. all over the place. editing a bit from my phone. apologies for the typos)

Cattle Drive into the Alps (1926) - Lise Gujer & Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. On wool & linen.

I have a brother - a twin brother - with Cerebral Palsy. I never learned how to bring this fact up or talk about it deeply with people in my life - people who weren’t family and didn’t know my brother already. It always felt damn near impossible to explain the interiority of my relationship with E. - and to do so without eliciting what felt like pity. I always hated bringing it up. So often I resorted to silence - avoided questions about siblings or family because I didn’t want to broach the uncomfortable conversation of explaining my brother’s disability, seeing a mix of pitied & not-sure-what-to-say faces, and having to explain what it all ‘meant’ for my family.

As i get older though, i realize (of course) that much of this was internal - I didn’t know how to communicate my relationship with E. because i didn’t fully understand and have my hands around what the extent of my relationship with him was and what i wanted to be. Im trying to be better about it all.

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Cerebral Palsy is a condition that primarily affects motor function caused by abnormal brain development. It can & does manifest in a range of ways in people.

E.’s motor function is pretty limited. Always has been. He can’t walk and talking is difficult. We mostly stick to yes or no questions. He’s a great listener, maybe the best i know. I’m 10 minutes older than him and I don’t let him forget it. He has the biggest heart but he’s a huge brat sometimes - and he gets away with it usually. I love him so much.

Just by the nature of it all, my relationship with E. has been dominated by care & responsibility. Some of my earliest memories from childhood are of helping Ma take care E. - carrying him from his wheelchair to the bed, helping him eat, drink, go to the bathroom. From an early age i was (in the back of my head) aware of the size of my responsibility to E - both in the present and in the future. My mother was quick to remind me (mostly when we fought) that “once Abbu & I are gone you have to take care of E.” I never liked hearing that.

Despite (or because) of this, as soon as I could I wanted to leave home. I went to school out of state, as far north from Houston as possible in these contingent United states. I moved out to SF and worked there for many years instead of listening to my moms pleas of finding a job back home. I shirked my responsibilities and felt like i needed to get out.

Over the last few years though E.’s health got worse. Doctor visits became weekly affairs instead of every few months. A flurry of surgeries followed. I began to expect the worse whenever I got a call from Ma at an odd hour. And as E. got older, my parents were becoming older too. E. was big now & still needed to be physically supported and carried often. Care is expensive. It was all seeming untenable.

At the beginning of 2022 i decided to move back home to Houston - to be closer to family, to help take care of E, to follow through, for once, on my responsibilities.

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I’ve been thinking about responsibilities a lot these days - what we owe to the people we love and how much. How our responsibilities shape us and bind us together.

There are a lot of days where I wake up and think about how much I miss San Francisco and what I left behind, how challenging adjusting to Houston has been, how much I fight my parents, how difficult this all seems. But I’m also slowly learning that my responsibilities hold me together. So much of what I (begrudgingly) like about myself comes directly from E. & my parents. Things I’ve learned from them, things i’ve taught myself through them, things they’ve prepared me for - what they’ve given me and what i owe them.

It took me far too long to really contend with all of this - I’m still struggling with it all frankly. When i think about the past, some days i feel real guilty - guilt about avoiding what felt like a clear set of responsibilities to my loved ones for so long. Ashamed that i hadn’t wrestled with those responsibilities deeply, that i refused to not only talk about them but avoided them & ran away. Other days i feel indebted to my younger self who felt like his main responsibility was to himself - only if that taught me how deeply that world just wasn’t for me.

Mostly though - I used to feel very lonely about it all. That these responsibilities felt uniquely mine and mine alone to bear. But as i look around these days at so many people i’m close to - people who come from families where they are the first to step out, children of immigrants, black & brown kids trying to chart out their own course - I keep seeing the same thing: friends contending with how to merge their lives with their families and loved ones. Trying earnestly to hold their responsibilities & dreams to themselves and responsibilities to those closest to them. It feels unique & special to this particular moment to me.

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How much of our lives are for ourselves versus for the people we love?

I've been trying to figure that shit out all year. It's been really difficult - I’ve messed up a bunch of times. But I suppose this is the nature of responsibilities - they aren't always easy and that's the point. Somedays I feel stretched to my limit, each responsibility pulling me in a different direction until there is no space left for me to pulled into. Somedays my responsibilities fill me up, that this is what I came here to do and here I am doing it. Most days I'm just trying to make it through.