I have told you, my friends, about many of my most personal secrets and characteristics. But there are a few that I have not shared. One of these is something that I will not share until I can talk with a friend about it. But the other one is not really a secret. It simply doesn’t come into my story.
Quite honestly, I could continue my story without it, but those of you who have come to know me through my writings may have unanswered questions that hang around this part of who I am.
If you’ve read my story from the beginning, you will remember that I was adopted, and that I have a twin brother. But I never mentioned him after that because we live such separate lives that he never came into the story.
My brother and I were originally quite similar. Our autism caused us to be developmentally delayed, and so we would act years younger than our age on a regular basis. In fact, over the course of about five years, I made up a completely fictional world, and we would act out the various parts in it, even those of animals.
Long after I should have outgrown that stage, I finally began to get tired of it. The biggest thing that slowed me down in getting past it was the fact that I didn’t want to lose the world I had created. So finally, in 2020, I used the solution you’ve seen me turn to so often: I started a book about it. And by December of 2022, I had created a work which was about 90,000 words long.
But my brother did not outgrow the fantasy world when I did. He simply adapted it to run without me and remained deeply involved with it.
At this point, as I began growing up, I entered the course of life that you have been reading about up until now. But my brother began to interact with the world around him as if he were in fact the person he played out in his fantasy world—the world that I created for him.
On top of this, he has always been generally unable to engage in a normal conversation or group of people. And as time goes on, he becomes increasingly volatile and aggressive, especially toward my parents.
It is hard to describe him in great detail, but with every passing moment, he becomes progressively more volatile. My mom is becoming more stressed, troubled, and generally distraught, and my brother’s outbursts become more and more frequent and intense.
My parents are now looking for a place to send him for help, which means that he will be leaving. This hurts my parents, but I can’t tell you how I feel. It may be that our lives are so separate, but I won’t know until after the fact what effect it will have on me. And when I do, it will probably be one of those things that I keep hidden for quite some time.