EPISTLE VI: To The One Everyone Tried to Save — and the One Nobody Noticed Was Drowning
To the sibling who struggles with addiction & to the one who does not,
I watched Four Good Days recently and cried at the ending with the kind of relief that settles deep into the body. Molly survived. Somehow, after all the destruction, stress, chaos and exhaustion, she was still alive. And then I noticed, how it made me feel that her sister played such a small role and had no place in that happy ending. To me that significance buzzed louder in my emotional rollercoaster than the seemingly soft landing back at home with mom for Molly.
I realized while watching this movie that I have immense compassion for people struggling with addiction. But there is still one place in me where compassion catches in my throat.
The scene where mom and big sister are just trying to connect over French fries and coffee wrecked me. I noticed that the “responsible one” was struggling with an unhealthy pattern too, but not enough for mom to pay attention.
Before I admit where the compassion runs dry in me, let me say that I work with people in behavioral health and mental health services, and every day I encounter human beings trying to survive. Some are fighting addiction. Some are fighting despair. Some are fighting minds and memories that refuse to let them rest. And somewhere along the way, God softened my heart enough to sit with suffering without immediately judging it.
I see the ache beneath it.
I see the trauma.
I see the loneliness.
I see the unbearable cycles people get trapped inside.
But where I stumble is in the memory of home — or at least what it contained growing up until I left home at age 18.
Because it is one thing to witness addiction in strangers and clients. It is another thing entirely to grow up beside it; to have your childhood shaped around it. To watch your family orbit one person’s addiction like a second sun.
I have always assumed that bitterness would look obvious if it were still alive in me. I thought it would look like rage. Obsessing or stewing. Cruelty. Hatred. Sharp words and slammed doors.
But bitterness is quieter than that sometimes. In fact for me, it’s tacit. Bitterness looks like silent indifference for the well being of a sibling whose behavior has not changed and whose cycle has never been broken.
Sometimes bitterness sounds like: Why was there always enough energy to rescue them, but never enough energy to notice me?
Sometimes bitterness is grief that never received comfort.
I know addiction is devastating. I know families become desperate. I know parents often enable out of terror, guilt, exhaustion, or love distorted by fear. I know these things intellectually, professionally and spiritually.
But deep in my soul, I also know what it feels like to become “the responsible one” in a family engulfed in the wild fires of dysfunction.
The capable child.
The low-maintenance child.
The one who survives quietly enough that nobody asks whether survival is costing them anything.
My brother has struggled with addiction since he was twelves years old. Decades have passed. We are in our mid-forties now and the gravitational pull of his suffering still shapes everything around him. My parents have carried him financially, emotionally and practically — whether they always wanted to or not. They have rescued and protected and provided. They have tried to compensate for every deficit his addiction and destructive lifestyle created.
And I think the part of what has broken my heart is realizing that my competence became the reason nobody worried about me.
The family emergency became so loud that nobody noticed the quiet child adapting to survive.
I do not say this to condemn my brother or my parents. I say it because pretending wounds do not exist has never healed them.
There are moments when I think of my brother and feel compassion. Real compassion. I see the child underneath the addiction. I see how pain and trauma and injustice mutates people. I see how shame becomes its own prison and how exhausting it must be to carry such heavy chains. I see the ugliness of denial in parents and a codependent spouse who lash out if anyone mentions the truth. It’s sad to watch another generation be raised in dysfunction.
But there are other moments when I consider him and feel the ache of everything addiction stole from me too.
Not money.
Not attention alone.
Parents who were emotionally available. Safety. Consistency. Protection. Rest.
Sometimes I think the hardest thing to confess is not the anger, but the envy.
Not envy for the addiction itself, but envy for the fact that pain made him visible while mine made me disappear.
I think maybe this is where God keeps meeting me lately — and inviting me actually — to be honest, but not in condemnation for my bitterness, but in the truth that makes space for His power to come set me free.
Because healing is not pretending I was unaffected. Compassion does not require me to erase myself or how I experience addiction hijacking the one place I should have felt I could belong: family.
I think I kept praying for God to remove bitterness as though it were a singular infection He could cut out all at once. But healing has felt more like an excavation of my memories and my soul. Every layer uncovered reveals grief buried beneath it. Not always hatred. Sometimes sorrow. Sometimes weariness. Something deep down in me begins to realize that I have been carrying invisible wounds while telling myself “I’m fine.”
And still somehow, God remains gentle with me.
Gentle with the sibling who stayed.
Gentle with the sibling who broke.
Gentle with the parents who did not know how to love without fear.
Gentle with the child in me who learned to survive by becoming easy to overlook.
“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” —Psalm 56:8
I am beginning to believe that God sees both children in these stories of addiction: the prodigal who collapses under the weight of their pain, and the quiet sibling standing outside carrying wounds no one celebrated surviving.
He sees the addicted.
He sees the exhausted caretaker.
He sees the child who acted out.
He sees the child who disappeared into responsibility.
Nothing is hidden from God. Not even the grief we have spent years trying to sanctify away…
I do not want my wounds to become my theology nor bitterness to erode my soul.
I do not want resentment to harden into self-righteousness.
I do not want pain to rob me of tenderness.
I do not want the neglected parts of me to become incapable of mercy.
So this is my confession:
sometimes I still feel bitter
sometimes I still grieve
sometimes compassion and resentment coexist inside me in ways I do not fully understand
And maybe healing begins the moment we stop calling that failure and start calling it truth.
To the one everyone tried to save: I hope you live.
And to the one nobody noticed was drowning because they looked responsible: I hope you live too.
with honesty and hope in recovery,
Imelda — DUST+GLORY
