Five years ago today was the last time I talked to my best friend—and one of the biggest tormentors of my childhood.

My brother and I grew up hating each other in many ways, fueled by jealousy that never should have existed.

Our parents were wonderful people who did the best they could with the tools they had been given by their own experiences and by the people they admired. But they were ill-equipped to handle three children, especially when their second child was born with a heart defect and other complications that would affect our entire family for the rest of our lives.

My brother didn’t start wanting me dead until he had been bullied to the point where I became an outlet for the pain he was suffering.

When he went away to college, he experienced a psychotic episode, and everything he had been trying to build seemed to hit a wall and disappear.

I don’t remember much of him from the before days.

The brother who once wanted me dead eventually became someone suffering from so much physical and emotional pain that he wasn’t always a safe person to be around, for many different reasons.

And yet, I still cry when I think about the person who genuinely believed I could do anything.

My advocacy project exists in his memory.

I know now that there wasn’t anything I could have done to fix his life. The one thing I could do was listen to him.

For a long time, we blamed our oldest brother for much of our suffering. As adults, though, I began to understand our family differently. Once I was able to explain to my brother why our parents had been different with their firstborn, he began to understand something important too:

The three of us may have grown up in the same family, but we did not have the same childhood.

Yes, this is also the brother who pushed me when I was three years old and caused me to break my arm.

Both things can be true.

We were children. We didn’t understand how difficult life was when your parents didn’t have health insurance. We didn’t understand why our parents would be separated for entire summers. We didn’t understand why they stayed together “for the kids” when, from our perspective, they seemed to have nothing in common and no reason to spend time together.

I understand some of that differently now because I lived my own version of it.

I spent years in what felt like a loveless marriage. I was willing to stay because of our shared responsibilities. I never seriously considered finding someone else because somewhere inside me, I was afraid to discover whether someone could actually love me the way I needed to be loved.

Even now, when I experience that kind of love, part of me thinks it is too good to be true.

Even now, I am afraid I will be abandoned.

I am the type of person who needs the other person to give up and leave, because I don’t know how to be the one who walks away. My heart has always ached for someone to love me exactly as I am.

But something is changing.

I finally have a family growing around me—a collection of people I love and can call when I am lonely. Maybe I still don’t have many people who would immediately show up if I were in a car accident or lying in a hospital bed. But I have more connection than I once believed was possible.

Looking backward, maybe I should have known something was changing when my brother became the third person in my family who couldn’t attend my wedding.

I wish he had been there.

Sometimes I wonder whether one simple gesture, one different conversation, one moment of connection could have changed something in his life.

I’ll never know.

Over the years, I have developed an almost strange sense of empathy. Sometimes I don’t know exactly where I end and another person begins. I have started feeling as though all of us are pieces of one larger consciousness that most of us simply fail to recognize.

Maybe someday I will see my brother again.

For now, I get glimpses of him through memory.

And I am left wondering: What was the meaning of his life, if not partly to push me toward becoming something larger than myself?

So I will build.

I will read.

I will write.

I will create art.

I will keep trying to become better than I was the day before, because if I don’t try to embody the change I want to see in the world, how can I ask anyone else to believe that change is possible?

My life right now isn’t what I imagined it would be.

I live in a place that should have been a happier chapter than it has been. I signed a lease that required me to surrender more autonomy than I understood, and I have felt punished for trying to heal while assuming I still had the freedom to live.

Sometimes my mind spirals through every possible explanation for how I ended up here.

Maybe I was born into a country that is too comfortable with suffering.

Maybe I was born from desperation.

Maybe I am the result of a failed abortion.

Maybe I have a different father than my brothers.

Maybe I was never supposed to be alive.

Maybe I was meant for greatness.

Maybe I was born simply to create the lives of people who will someday change the world in ways I cannot even imagine.

I will probably never know why I exist.

I may never live long enough to see the full results of my dreams.

But maybe I can create something bigger than myself. Maybe I can build a life where fear no longer gets to make all of my decisions.

I still have a tremendous amount to process.

There is anger.

Resentment.

Jealousy.

Depression.

Anxiety.

There is grief for the life I gave up on because, somewhere inside me, I always knew it wasn’t big enough to make me happy.

I’ve always had this dream of a family farm—although, amusingly, I don’t actually want to be responsible for all the animals.

I want a large piece of land where people who genuinely enjoy caring for animals can do it. I want a farm stand filled with handmade things, from jewelry and soaps to the strange and specialized creations that come out of my imagination.

I want a storefront where all the different pieces of me can coexist.

And I want to travel the world.

If I could build that life, I think I would be more grateful than I could possibly explain.

I want a life full of love.

I want a life filled with adventure.

I want a life where I finally get to discover who I might have been if I had felt free to become myself from the beginning.

And I want to hear people’s stories.

Every person is carrying pain that the rest of us cannot completely understand. I may not have the answers to anyone else’s suffering, but I can listen.

Sometimes knowing that someone is listening matters.

I grew up with a father who loved me deeply but never said some of the words a little girl desperately wants to hear from her father.

For years, I didn’t understand why.

Eventually I learned about what my family considered my mother’s affair with her therapist. But when I look at the information I have now alongside my own experiences, I see that story differently.

I don’t believe the most important betrayal was necessarily sexual.

I think she found another man to talk to about the parts of herself she wasn’t sharing with her husband.

The communication that is essential to an intimate relationship had disappeared.

I wish someone had taught me how to communicate better.

I wish I had understood coercive control earlier.

I wish I hadn’t needed a lifetime of self-doubt before so much of what I thought I knew about relationships, family, love, and myself was shattered.

But most of all, I wish my brother had been able to see me through to the end of this journey.

He died almost exactly as he had imagined he would.

That last day, I helped him with one final thing. Then he went on to ask other members of our family to step up too.

Unfortunately, I was the only one who did.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe I can do anything.

I don’t always believe that about myself yet.

But when my days become dark and the sun refuses to shine, there is still a tiny beam of light inside me that belongs to him.

Today marks five years since I talked to my brother for the last time.

Five years since my life was normal in any recognizable sense of the word.

It was the last day of my life as I knew it.

I never would have imagined that five years later I would be sitting in my bed writing this, remembering both the beautiful and terrible parts of our lives, while sitting beside someone who sometimes seems to have known me from before all the bad things happened—back when our lives were completely different and none of us knew what was coming.

I went on to become a teenage parent.

He went on a journey through addiction.

And now there is someone beside me who sometimes says things about moments in my life that I can’t understand how he could possibly know unless, somehow, our paths crossed long before either of us realized it.

I don’t know what any of that means.

Maybe I’m not supposed to.

What I do know is that I hope I find myself somewhere even more amazing five years from now.

For most of my life, I have needed to make my family proud because I haven’t known how to do any of this simply for myself.

I’m trying to learn.

Maybe that’s what the next five years are for.