oh.my.god.

My mom just left the apartment and I asked my sister where she went. "To the hospital." Uh... What?

Apparently my other sister, who's not yet sixteen, was at a party last night and got so drunk that she couldn't ask anyone to call my mom or give them her number or anything so she ended up in the hospital, presumably because her friend's parents didn't know what else to do with her. And that would explain where my mom disappeared off to last night; she went to pick her up but they said they wanted to keep her overnight.

I knew my sister likes to go to parties and I knew she drinks, but I guess I wouldn't have expected her to be so... stupid? Maybe that's a bad word, but I can't think of any other way to put it.

Either way, she's in a shitload of trouble.

(Now I'm going to talk about a lot of alcoholism and a little eating disorder stuff but it's turning really long so I'm putting it below a cut)



I think this should be worrying more than it is. I'm so used to competing with her (we don't have the greatest relationship, although it is getting better) that right now my head's all full of thoughts about how she's gotten piss-drunk before me, what else has she done at these parties, what kind of a reputation is she going to have at school or within our family...

But in the back of my mind I am worried. My mom was a bulimic and alcoholic. Since I take after her in more ways than one, especially with the whole addictive-personality (and even though she was never diagnosed I'd be willing to bet money she's got borderline personality disorder as well), I've always been super weary about alcohol. I already fell for the bulimia, but I've promised myself I would not become an alcoholic. Parents say their job is to make sure their kids' lives are better than theirs, right? So if I can just escape the alcoholism, that's a step better, right? Besides the fact that I experienced earlier on what alcoholism can do to a person and family. I didn't even know my mom had been bulimic until after I started binging and purging myself (or was it shortly before...? No matter, point is I didn't have any first-hand experience with it.)

But alcoholism is something I never want to fall into. And when we moved to this country where there's virtually no drinking age and I knew I'd be going to parties and drinking with friends, I took some precautions and set some rules. Namely, no getting piss drunk. And no using alcohol to deal with my problems; as soon as I realized that I was drinking because I wanted to forget something and not just hanging out with friends, drink goes down.

My first year here I didn't have a problem with that. I didn't have much of a social life (thank you, social anxiety and depressive withdrawal) and the few parties that I did go to I had a drink or two and that was it. BFF, with whom I went everywhere, also wasn't a huge drinker, so it worked.

This year I started drinking more. When BFF threw a birthday party we both decided that since we had just turned eighteen, we could get drunk one night. And we did. And it was fun and harmless. And I could still speak German as well as ever, so I didn't worry about it. I even had fun. Since then we've gone out with a group once where we all drank... not a ton, but more than just a drink or two. And I threw my own party, where we drunk plenty.
But never piss drunk where anyone would have to go to the hospital.

And even when I was at my lowest and binging and purging and cutting and taking laxatives and smoking and doing anything I could to hurt myself, I didn't turn to alcohol. I never wanted to take that chance.

So I guess the fact that my sister just did what she did could mean one of a few things. Either she's a naive not-quite-sixteen-year-old who wants to be cool and party with her friends and took it too far one night (or more than one night... I remember my mom talking about her coming home once and not being able to find the off button on the TV). Or something happened recently or has been happening and she was looking for an escape and turned to partying and drinking to take a break. In which case, I should be really concerned. She never had eating disorder problems as far as I can tell. I know she's dieted every once in a while, and at one point I was worried she had taken it too far and wasn't eating enough but part of that was also jealousy, but never to the extent of what I've done. I'd be shocked if I learned that she's ever cut herself and even more shocked if she's ever smoked.

She's got her personality defects too. I won't go into that, but I think all of us kids have something really wrong with us and could use therapy. We had too many family problems young in life to have emerged completely normal and none of us really deal with anger in a healthy way. Of course, when my mom dared suggest therapy for my sister she got super offended and accused her of comparing the two of us.

Anyways. The point is, I hope she's not using alcohol as an escape. Because alcoholism is most definitely in our genes and everything about our childhood and upbringing kind of sets us up for it. And as much as we don't get along and even though a part of me (a part of me which is- thankfully- slowly getting smaller) wants to see her crash and burn harder than I did, I can't imagine having to watch her go through something like that.