He's the Stephen Riddell who registered for Political Advertising with Facebook during the 2020 Election. Stephen Patrick Riddell, while my uncle is Stephen Ross Riddell (I think...). It must amuse our friends to watch us fight over Facebook, possibly even more than we amused our flatties when Stephen was managing the Wallace Street flat. - Yes, he sounds like it reads. I dunno if his brain is different to mine, but there is a family story that Mum liked to tell when we were kids: she got an ultrasound a few weeks before we were born (6 weeks premature), and that ultrasound said one was brain-damaged and the other was a girl. The best part of my holiday has been not having to deal with my brother. He was the one who cut me out, and he was pretty rude on the phone, so I’m fine with only sporadically hearing about him.
When we got the IQ tests taken, apparently I scored 152 and Stephen 148. That was around 5-6 years old. - I think this idea that I could somehow control my brother is utterly ridiculous. He made his own choices, and the disagreement about the anti-mandate occupation demonstrates that he saw things I didn’t intend in my work. I can’t really verify if the stories he tells the doctors are true or not, because I don’t know what he’s said. I do think that they seem to change, but bipolar does result in a memory that’s unreliable due to the effects of mania. I keep extensive journals, and that’s what helps me with keeping my narrative steady. - Ok, let’s talk about the trauma: Yes, Stephen knew I was a crossdresser. He found out when I was 11 or 12, shortly after I started dressing secretly. I begged him to keep that secret, and he did. We always fought, and the nards were fair game. However, our brothers encouraged us, and taught Stephen this game called ‘bag-n-tag’ where on the first of the month (or something like that), he’d tackle me and ‘tag’ my ear. And once the weight difference got to around 20kg, he often won fights by sitting on me. Plus punches – I may have started some of the fights, but he usually ended them. I totally think he was hitting on me the night that he jumped off the wall. His mate, Luke Tetlow, thought the same thing. But he was drugged out of his mind, so it’s hard to know precisely what he was trying to do. - Stephen takes magical thinking really seriously. He’s the one who reckons he’s a wizard, and his madness foregrounds those elements. And yeah, he’s a genuine right-winger. He’s keen on Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West book and Nietzche. He’s come around to the wealth tax, though, which is surprising.
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