It’s been so long since I wrote a blog post, I don’t even know where or how to start anymore. The muscle memory is long gone. But after seeing that my last post was in December of 2025, I realized I had to get SOMEthing down even though now we are already halfway through 2026.

I suppose there’s always something to say about family. Around Chinese New Year (Feb 2026), I was alerted once again by my cousin that my brother lunged at my father at a large family gathering. For me, this has been a broken record playing since I was a young adult. Continued family dysfunction where my father would nag, my brother would lose his shit, and they would go at it verbally and in later years, physically. Then, at the end of the day, my parents would continue to support my brother financially and my brother would live with them (WHY???), and then the cycle of eruption would happen all over again.

I think it was last year that I finally realized, with the help of my mental health nurse practitioner friend P, that my brother has borderline personality disorder. I know there’s the special manual and you can’t really be throwing around mental illness diagnoses without a legit medical background, but Imma go out on a limb here, and just fucking call the play.

Interestingly, P had also suggested that my childhood friend N, with whom I had a complicated and frustrating relationship, was also borderline. Borderline has various characteristics, and in many cases it presents in people who were vulnerable, sensitive children with hypercritical, demanding parents. Long story short, I do feel the way my parents parented contributed to this disorder cropping up in my brother, and now it’s run rampant and undiagnosed for decades. To make matters worse, now we’re in a position where my brother has totally gone conspiracy theorist crazy and he doesn’t believe in western meds at all. Meanwhile, he’ll do all kinds of crazy things to his body under the guise of “the practices being “holistic” practies, e.g. repeated colonics, ingestion of non-tested/non QC’d “supplements”, multi-week water-only fasts, whitening his teeth by scraping all the enamel off, walking barefoot in public and developing strange rashes on his legs, etc. Yeah, he does all these things in the name of health, and yet, he’s the least healthy-looking person out there. It’s hard for people to imagine this level of crazy, but he’s super messed up and without the aid of western meds to control this mental illness, we’re just left with crazy compounded by crazy and multiplied to the n’th degree.

My friend N passed away almost two years ago, and honestly, the parallels with my brother are uncanny: the addictive behaviors, self-loathing, self-consciousness, low self-esteem, perfectionism, constant overthinking, obsession over what other people said/thought, replays of the smallest social interactions, plus self-harm, moodiness, inability to hold a stable job, inability to have friends… I could go on and on. What I’ve learned is that the people who need the most help, are the ones the most resistant to anything that will help them. It’s not that they cannot focus or be disciplined about other things… they can and yet with their health, there is minimal effort or rather minimal progress.

I know that at the age of almost 50, it’s probably immature to blame your parents for anything. Still, I can’t help but reflect on their style of parenting that led us here. It’s a weird thing to feel like there HAS to be a culprit. What does it serve? Why does it matter? It probably doesn’t. But I still need something to blame, and in this case, it’s my parents and my brother.

Maybe there are more responsible parties but eh, I absolve myself. That’s the thing about ESTJ, Trustee-type people. They are confident in their actions and in their convictions. Hell, I was just a kid. And even as a young adult and now an old adult, I can only see the long history where so many times, I was told to “help” my brother as a way of helping my parents. And none of it worked. None of it did shit, bc they just had me reinforcing their bullshit parenting methods. They parented in a way that many immigrants parented. It was all that they knew. They did the best with what they had.

Fortunately, my personality is far different from that of my brother. Does that mean I was somehow spared? I dunno. Maybe. Or maybe it was years of therapy and journaling and a stable family unit with Bubbey that saved me from letting the trauma/borderline disorder. The generational trauma is ending with me.

After the CNY event, my extended family finally witnessed with their own eyes the level of violence, dysfunction, and abuse. The authorities were notified and my uncle removed my brother from my parents’ home. The collective mentality of Taiwan came full force. But now, four months later, what progress has been made? In the very least, he’s no longer living with my parents. Hopefully, they are no longer in communication, bc he cannot control his emotions and his rage. He is living at my aunt’s place.

Supposedly, he agreed to go to counseling, but he tried two therapists and didn’t think they were helping and then told me he found a new therapist “who could read past lives through the pulse in your wrist.”

Do you see what level of CRAY we are talking about here? That was mid-April right after my dog bit my hand (I was stupidly trying to break up a dog fight), I got stitches, then I also got laryngitis and lost my voice. So yeah, when he texted me that line, I totally lost my shit. Since then, no further updates. And honestly, I am done. Done with the bullshit scams that he keeps falling for, done with the emotional manipulation, done with this mental illness robbing my family of any normalcy. I’m done with any trace of him in my life. I’m done being called in to be the fixer of a problem that I was neither responsible for causing nor capable of solving.