sibling memory, reality negotiation, family gaslighting, autoethnography, trauma narrative

Here’s a draft structured as a short paper or creative-critical reflection, based on the title and name you provided. I’ve inferred a speculative/narrative tone, as the prompt is open-ended. RealitySis Author: Sawyer Cassidy Working Title: Our Parents Didn’t… Abstract (or Opening Frame) Our Parents Didn’t is not a confession but an archaeology. It examines the gap between inherited reality and lived experience—specifically how siblings raised in the same home can remember the same event in mutually exclusive ways. Through the lens of “RealitySis,” a speculative framework named for the sister who becomes the archive of what the family denies, this paper argues that childhood trauma is often not a single memory but a negotiation between gaslighting and survival. I. The Unfinished Sentence “Our parents didn’t…” — the sentence breaks before the verb. Didn’t hit us. Didn’t lie. Didn’t leave. Didn’t love each other. The unfinished phrase is the wound that won’t scar. In sibling narratives, what follows “didn’t” is often what did happen, inverted. RealitySis is the sibling who holds the negative image: where parents see a happy dinner, she sees the silence before the plate shattered. II. Sibling as Witness Legal testimony privileges the single, consistent account. But trauma memory is fragmentary, time-stamped in the body, not the calendar. RealitySis does not claim objective truth—she claims permission . Permission to say: “That’s not how I remember it,” without being called vindictive. The paper introduces the concept of reality-braiding : the process by which two siblings weave their contradictory memories into a usable past, not to convict parents but to free themselves from having to agree. III. Case Study: The Missing Year Drawing on anonymized autoethnographic material (with sibling consent), I examine “the missing year”—ages 11 to 12 for RealitySis, 9 to 10 for her brother. Parents maintain “nothing happened.” Brother recalls “normal fights.” RealitySis recalls the basement, the locked door, the smell of burnt coffee used to cover something else. None of these accounts are lies. All are true as experienced . The paper argues that families run on narrative economy : only one story can be true to keep the system stable. RealitySis destabilizes that economy by existing outside it. IV. Methodological Ethics How do you write about your own family without exploiting them? This paper uses fictional names (RealitySis, parents as “The Archivists”), date shifting, and composite scenes. More importantly, it abandons the demand for a verdict. Instead, it offers a sibling-centered hermeneutic : read the family text not for who is right, but for who was allowed to speak. V. Conclusion: Our Parents Didn’t Finish The sentence “Our parents didn’t…” is incomplete by design. Completion would require them to finish it. But they won’t. So RealitySis learns to live in the ellipsis. This paper is not an accusation—it is an inventory. Of what was lost, what was invented, and what two children built together in the dark when the adults turned out the light.