My social anxiety, and my niece's far worse issues. in The Big, Blue House, year one.

Things continue to go reasonably well. I watered the shrubs yesterday, and put some jack o lanterns in the windows.

There’s a spigot for a hose at the front of the house, and a hose hook, but the water doesn’t seem to be turned on to it, and we can’t find a way to turn it on. Don put a hose on the back of the house, but I prefer to water everything late at night, when my chances of being spoken to by a neighbor are as low as possible, and walking around back to turn on the hose and drag it to the front at 2 a.m. is just creepy. (There are lights, but still.) So I use gallon jugs, (better for mixing in Miracle-Gro anyway), and carry them out the front door. With all of those shrubs it takes an hour and a half, and leaves me pretty beat. So go me, maintaining the shrubbery and avoiding human contact in sub-ideal conditions.

My favorite niece’s mental health appears to have gotten worse. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m both worried for her, and afraid to ask. Her father, my half brother, has delusional bipolar disorder. He thought, for instance, that the robotic toy cat I sent our mother several years ago had a camera in it, through which I watched him. (They lived in the same apartment building.)

She seems to have inherited it. Now there are several posts on her Facebook page to the effect that she’s left her job and her home and gone to a relative’s house, because someone, she doesn’t know who, is “fucking with” her. She wishes they’d come forward and stop “messing up her life”.

I’m seeing shades of my aunt Lucille, now long dead and no relation to her, before she was put in an institution. She thought her son was swapping her medication with poison. Our cousin found her sitting on her steps with an ice pick, waiting for him.

I want to ask her what’s going on, but when she tells me, how do I respond to her delusions? She needs help, but she can’t afford it, and I can’t see her situation ending well, and I have no idea what to do.