On Knowing Oneself.

 I've recently reconnected with my sister. 
I am frankly desperate to understand my past, our childhood, her experience and perspectives.
She is not interested in digging up the past, and as much as I appreciate she is under no compulsion to do so, I'm very, very curious to know her perspective. Desperate, I suppose, if I were to use a word. 

I know myself in the context of the family - a narcissistic parent, and an authoritarian parent -  and as the family scapegoat in both my family of origin and in the two resulting blended families. 

I know myself as a perpetual problem for my parents. I know myself as my mother's blame station - anything I did, said, thought (and expressed) was somehow only to frustrate her, and/or embarrass her in the church. I know myself as someone my father couldn't form into the teacher/nurse he thought I should become/expected me to be. They were born at the start of the great depression, so leeway for culture and all that, but still. 

I know myself as someone my sister has been angry at, or toward for years. I don't know why. I don't know if that's about me or about her own frustrations, and now, I'm not even sure if that is true. All I know is I'm terrified we will never properly reconnect. I am terrified to ask her about any of it. I know she hates thinking about any of it, let alone talking about it. The entire thing is so fragile. 

I know myself as someone people have greatly disliked - or it feels that way because I have so often been marginalized, whether by my own choosing or by events. I do not understand myself at all through any other eyes than those of my parents. I realize this is the emotional expression, and am aware, logically, "most" is a subjective term from the perspective of my being roundly disliked by my mother, and criticized by my father (who, I also acknowledge, wanted the best for me, despite not having the wisdom to accept the difference between 1951 and 1995 as it relates to women's roles, jobs, knowledge...).

With that in the picture, I desperately want to connect with my sister to sort some of this out. I'm very afraid her not wanting to go there and my needing to will cause another rift. We have spent so many years disconnected, distrustful/distrusting. 

On some levels, we are quite alike. On others, one being my weird technicolour memory and her not having that kind of memory at all, it has been very hard to talk about things. 

I need to talk about this stuff with the only other person in the world who lived through it.