We are both oldest children, and the significance of that cannot be dismissed. No matter how slight the expectations projected onto us by our parents, it has been our (spoken or unspoken) responsibility to set the bar and be an example since before we can even remember. Whatever the success metric, we pressure ourselves to meet it.

I wonder whether I would be as free-spirited and brave as they seem to be, if I had been raised by her parents. She used to wear the denim jacket her father wore when he hitchhiked to Alaska...my father would never, in a million years, hitchhike to Alaska. From what I know, they are brilliant, beautiful, and caring, all of them. We are just brilliant and arguably beautiful, but self-interested in a way that they are not.

The approach is the same, only the emphasis is different. We have so few guidelines, no instructions on how to get to point B from here, just the implication of where we're supposed to end up, and the desperate wish of every child not to disappoint. While they make their own paths, we pour ourselves into the mold of intellectual superiority, financial stability, and social normality, inasmuch as such a thing is possible or even exists, today. I wonder whether, under other circumstances, my mother could have raised such spiritually courageous offspring as they are.

My step-sisters have, I think, suffered much worse. They have no point B, they have only the unconditional but slightly exasperated love of their mother, and my father's thinly-veiled suspicion that he is too late to help them. Though I do finally think that he would be a good parent, now. They appear to have chosen for themselves, but rather than make their way towards a stated goal, they stumble, blind, resisting direction, as my siblings and I look on baffled and horrified.

The power to choose our own destinies is, as everything, a blessing and a curse. Choice and opportunity paralyze us at every turn, the fear of regret often outweighing the fear of failure. And so we try to pack too much into lives already consumed with empty tasks, gaining satisfaction from so precious little of it.

My heart goes out to those who are bold enough to refuse to decide until they are damned good and ready, for even if the pattern of the universe does not reveal itself to you while you look on it, I think the wait alone will prove worthwhile.

Best of luck, Kyle.




For context.