“I thought it was normal, until I realized it wasn’t.”
When I was growing up, my older brother was everything to me. He was the protector, the one who always made me laugh when things got hard. But then came the drugs—first just weed, then pills, then the deeper stuff. He started changing slowly, and I didn’t really understand what was happening. I thought maybe he was just going through a phase. The way he looked at me started to shift; he became distant, unpredictable. He’d be there one minute, and then gone for days, disappearing into the world of addiction.
It tore me apart when I had to be the one to explain to my friends why he wasn’t around. My parents were always working, always too tired to deal with it. I had to be the one to pick up the pieces when things went wrong. The hardest part was watching him spiral and knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wasn’t old enough to understand addiction fully, but I knew it was taking him away from me. I started to believe that I was invisible to him, that I wasn’t enough to make him care.
The turning point came when I was 16. My brother overdosed. He survived, but it was a wake-up call. He went into rehab for the first time, and I thought, “This is it. He’ll come back to me.” But recovery wasn’t a straight path. It was messy, filled with relapses, and each time it felt like I was losing him all over again.
I spent so much time focusing on him and trying to fix things that I forgot about myself. I became a codependent, always trying to be the “good sister,” the one who could fix the broken parts of his life. But eventually, I learned that I can’t fix someone else’s journey, and that’s okay. What I can do is focus on my own healing. Therapy helped me with that, and I started to rebuild a life that wasn’t tied to his addiction.
If there’s one thing I’d tell someone going through something similar, it’s this: your worth isn’t tied to their struggle. You can love someone without losing yourself in the process. And sometimes, the best way to love someone with an addiction is by taking care of yourself first.