Sisters

The mere fact of observing something changes its nature. This idea may be familiar to anyone who has repeatedly suffered through lectures on the wave-particle nature of light.

What does this have to do with the title of this post?

Not a lot, except I know my sister reads this blog (Hi, Sis), and the mere fact I know she is reading it will probably change what I'm going to say, even though I haven't written it yet.

All that rambling aside, I'm going to attempt to try to explain my view of this sister relationship dynamic I have going on with my favoritest (and only) sister.

(I was going to try to get this out Saturday, but with one thing and another, one thing being my Rifts game is on Saturday nights and another thing being that I bought the champion bundles on League of Legends and so kept trying new champs while waiting for people to stop yammering so the Rifts game could start. Not that you need to know or care about that. But that's why this post did not come out on Saturday)

As I've grown up I've read some stuff on birth-order dynamics, which basically states that your birth order determines what kind of person you are and what kind of problems you might have. This slightly out of context quote from Times highlights the dilemma of the middle child:

If eldest sibs are the dogged achievers and youngest sibs are the gamblers and visionaries, where does this leave those in between? That it's so hard to define what middle-borns become is largely due to the fact that it's so hard to define who they are growing up. The youngest in the family, but only until someone else comes along, they are both teacher and student, babysitter and babysat, too young for the privileges of the firstborn but too old for the latitude given the last.

From my experience, not only in my family but observing other families, it seems as though the eldest spawn child doesn't have to worry about forging their own identity because it's more or less handed to them from the moment they scaled the refrigerator to get into the cookie jar. Doubt and indecision appear utterly alien to their makeup. They appear in the world, and the world starts revolving around them. Any siblings coming along later tend to get swept up into orbit.

My sister always seemed to be so suave, with a stone-carved plan of action, so outgoing, so full of wisdom and bright ideas...to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, she is the vampire while I am the werewolf. Just being around her makes me feel fangier and hairier by comparison, without her even trying to make me feel that way.

So it's hard to explain why I feel as though I've had to paint myself my own identity and that it doesn't mean I don't love her, only that I feel a need to be my own person. It's like trying to explain to a colorblind person what red looks like.

So to oldest siblings everywhere: It's not that we don't love you and think the world of you (most of the time), just we DO happen to be unique people too, and it may not be the same person you thought we were growing up.

That is all.