My Little Sibling Left for College: A Journal Entry
He can’t even whip up a banana shake to save his life; it’s going to be hilarious
My younger brother left for college earlier this month. After months of vying and waiting, he finally is getting to live college away from home.
For me, a large part of the appeal was living away from home, but I sealed my lips because I didn’t want to rub the entire spice box into this child’s wounds but now that he’s there, I’m glad you made it. I saw that you were going crazy wailing about the loss of youth. (Tip: This is not your youth; your youth lasts if you want it to last)
Since I must make everything about myself, this is an account of how I feel now that the person I got along with the most in my family has left the madhouse.
Part of me feels great. You deserve a normal college life. You must get sick, throw up, run out of money, share rooms with strangers, get lost in big cities, do your own laundry, manage your own food, get your appliances fixed, go to the doctor by yourself and most importantly, find yourself.
I think you have been mollycoddled by the parents but that’s what every older sibling thinks. I had to grow up a lot faster than you did because I became the older one at the age of four while you remained a baby till the age of nineteen. You’re still the baby but now you’re out there far away from the people who cosset you. Here’s your opportunity to grow and finally develop thoughts and ideas that aren’t borrowed from our family ideologies.
My only advice to you is that you must always prioritize having a good time. Exercise the privilege of age and do things that make you feel alive, the activities I leave to your judgement.
I was always prepared for you to go but now that you live away — I find myself speaking of you fondly, something that seldom happened in your presence primarily because you really got on my nerves with your rotten behaviour and secondly because my threshold has always been the lowest with you.
I am not going to open my heart and tell you that I miss you and life is terrible without you because it’s not. I’ve always wanted to be an only child, the apple of everyone’s eye, a place you conveniently took away from me in June 2002 but that’s okay — I got used to the soul-crushing weight of being the oldest daughter and older sister. The weight of being a good example for you, not that you needed one, but I still felt compelled. But for what it’s worth, it’s a little bit boring now that you live somewhere else. I learnt what healthy love is — it’s freeing, and it wants the best for you, and it is enabling.
Through you, I can be 18 and 22 at the same time. Through you, I can time travel to a younger self. Through you, I live everything twice.
When you called me to ask me where you can rent a PS4 and a TV, I felt like the cool older sister, but I also remembered how I had no one to tell me any of this and I would like to emphatically iterate that these younger siblings have it much easier because they can find a crutch in their older siblings — which is okay but please be thankful.
Sibling relationships have not received their due importance in literature and movies and even when they are, they are limited to blasé, unrealistic, and outlying plots such as:
- evil sibling vs good sibling
- overachiever sibling vs dumb sibling
- siblings with strikingly different personalities who are always at loggerheads
- siblings who are competing for parents’ affection and income
- siblings who are willing to die/kill for each other
In this sea of overrepresentation and over-glorification of romantic love (the most unhelpful, conditional, and selfish form of love in my opinion), pivotal relationships of life are left unexplored.
Rivalry in siblingship is inevitable, we are constantly competing for our parents’ affection and resources. The childhood resentment is reasonable but once we start to fend for ourselves, we tend to support our siblings. They are the only ones who know the true extent of how embarrassing your family is and the childhood agony you are still carrying.
And as far as being home without my brother is concerned, it’s not so bad. I am glad he’s finally getting to live with his life. It made me realise what it’s like to want the best for someone selflessly. Detached love is the most liberating form of love and I don’t know if all of us have the good fortune of experiencing it. A form of love that allows you to say I am happy for you sincerely. A form of love that makes you want to enable people’s hopes and dreams. A form of love that wants nothing in return.
Have fun, little one.
