My OCD Cousin Who Wants to Kill Me

I haven’t wrote about him in a while.

When I was 25 years old, my aunt and her son moved in with me and my parents. Now here it is almost 10 years later, and they’re still here. Well, I shouldn’t still be living here but that’s a different story (next year I’m buying a house!).

So, these two individuals, my aunt and my cousin, are among the two most dysfunctional people I’ve ever met. My cousin only leaves his room to go to the bathroom and he stays in the bathroom for hours at a time using up all the hot water. On days he has to poop (usually once a week), him and his mother rent a hotel room so he can take a 20 hour shower after having done his “duty”.

My cousin refuses to allow his mother to buy a car, so she has to rent one. My aunt blew through $250,000 just on rental cars – money from her deceased husbands life insurance policy. She used to have a really nice house, but the bathroom floor caved in from mold and water damage and they didn’t keep up with the mortgage payments and had to foreclose.

Today was my mother’s breaking point.

My aunt owes my mom $3000 (money she doesn’t have since her sole job is to look after her son who has to be at least 45 by now (he doesn’t work either)). And instead of paying my mom back, she pretends to.

Mom – “Where’s the money that you owe me? My bill came in.”

Aunt – “I put it on the desk.”

There was only $5 on my dad’s desk.

Mom – “No you didn’t, where is it?”

Aunt – “It’s there, or someone took it.”

I wasn’t here when all this went down, but I heard that it ended with a bout of screaming. Finally after all these years, my mom told her sister to get the fuck out of her house.

Finally!

So now my aunt is staying with my Aunt Rosemary, who just so happens to have a dysfunctional son of her own.

The hard truth is, I don’t care where they go as long as they’re not here. A big weight has lifted, a dark shadow that hung over our house for these last 10 years is dissipating.

My brother thinks they’ll be back. They always come back. For once I’m more hopeful than he is.

Anywho, in other news….

My brother bought out his ex-fiance’s share of their business making him the sole owner of an upscale spa. They do hair, nails, facials, scrubs, massage – they even have one of those fancy spa-type showers with all thems jets that squirt at you from every angle.

Now that he’s the sole owner, completely detached from his conniving ex, I want to see him succeed now more than ever. I hate it that his spa is literally two minutes away from mine. I hate that I can potentially damage his business.

I know it may not sound like a big deal, but in case you don’t know me by now – I feel everything incredibly deep – it cuts right into me.

The best visual I can give you to understand how I feel towards my brother taking on a $175,000 business debt and not knowing if he’ll succeed is this: Think of a woman cradling an infant. The woman crying profusely, stroking the infants head and telling it “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

The visual doesn’t make much sense, but that’s what popped into my head. The bigger my business gets, the smaller his looks. And he’s trying so hard!

But no matter what happens, I’ll never stop growing. What I’ve built has too much freaking potential – too much. I’ll never do hair, nails, scrubs, or the kind of facials he offers, but I WILL get big. Everyone in town will have heard of us, or know someone that’s a member here.

If I back down now in fear that it will mess up his business, I’ll stagnate. Before I ever see a profit, I’ll lose. It’s not any different from my parents letting my crazy aunt and cousin live here. My parents acquiesced to them and in return they lost 10 years of peace along with $3,000 – my aunt and cousin, never getting better, just growing older and more stupid – maybe resentful even.

I’ll never concede, never acquiesce. I’ll not give hand-outs to people who take advantage. People who don’t work or try – especially to those who lie, steal, and scream in your face that you’re the crazy one (what my aunt did to my mom).

I’ll never sacrifice my happiness to replace it with someone else’s misery.

Tomorrow will be my last long day of work in a very long time. It’s my last Wednesday of being on the schedule and I’m booked – fully booked. It’s going to suck. But then it’s just weekends from there on out.

We all have challenges to face. If there were no ways at winning these challenges, we wouldn’t be faced with them. There’s always a solution. For me, the best way to find a solution is to figure out what my desired outcome is (my intentions). And more often than not, my most desired outcome is freedom and happiness.

If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it. You’ll never find a solution. And I bet my bottom dollar that everyone’s most desired outcome (when at their ultimate level of clarity) is freedom and happiness. But our intentions get skewed into mistaking power for freedom and revenge for happiness. Revenge towards the people who hurt or angered you, and power for it to never happen again.

It’s living in the matrix of our one shared emotional ego web. Completely entangled, engulfed.

Anyway, I think I’m done for the night.