My Sister’s Very Own Green-Eyed Monster… Me
I’ve always loved my sister. She’s athletic, beautiful and funny. She is determined, personable and outright honest. We were born just a minute apart, four months premature and weighing in at one pound six ounces (her) and one pound nine ounces (me) respectively. Despite being told that we would possibly never walk, talk, see or attend a “normal” school, Leah, myself and my older brother Eric had a lucky childhood, a childhood spent playing with our cousins at parks and on front porches, wise enough not to leave without permission. We spent it learning about people and places from our mother, grandma, aunts and uncles, from books and The Reading Rainbow.
We were lucky children. I was a lucky child who was never given any indication that I was disabled or different from my siblings in any way. In the eyes of young, eager, hopeful Keah, my sister and I were one in the same… until we weren’t.
I’ve always loved my sister, but I didn’t always like her. Through no fault of her own, things changed between us when we started middle school. Long gone were the days of blissful ignorance and the wild faith in the world only a child can possess. I became aware of the eyes watching me walk as I made my way to and from class. Those years are the formative years, full of questions and awkwardness as preteens start trying to figure out who they are. While they were figuring out who they were, I was concerned with who I wasn’t. I wasn’t pretty, popular or athletic. I wasn’t all the things that I was convinced Leah got to be.
I prayed for a body just like Leah’s, tall and athletic, with completely functional hands and legs. Every night that I prayed for this new body and woke up without it, I internalized a deeper hatred for the one I was in and the twin sister who had the only thing I thought wanted but could never have — a body to that blends in.
Fast forward to freshman year of high school. My friends are going on dates and confessing attraction to crushes in all their awkward glory. At this point, I am still praying for a new body before senior prom. I liked a boy who didn’t like me back, and I blamed my body — not the fact that I was angry all the time and generally unpleasant to be around.
I told myself that Leah could be dating if she wanted to, but she didn’t, and it made me both envious and angry. I picked fights with her just so I would have an excuse to call her names — names I called myself when no one was listening. I tore her down like she was me, like she was broken and tired too. Maybe she was; I never stopped to ask. I was so jealous of her, so jealous of the way she walked, talked and looked. I was jealous of the way guys would come up to me and tell me that she was beautiful before asking if she was single. I was never the one they asked about, and I resented them and her for it. The envy I felt toward her consumed me. I was a green-eyed monster ready to pounce whenever I was given the opportunity.
Senior year rolled around, and I already decided that the prayers for a new body were fruitless. I focused on controlling my weight instead. I told myself that being skinny was my ticket to getting a date for prom, and even though I ate like a young teenage boy, I knew that if the scale read anything over 115, I didn’t have a chance at a date. I realized years later just how untrue and problematic that thought was.
I received my acceptance letter to my dream school and graduation was right around the corner. First, prom. I watched excitedly as my friends’ boyfriends asked them out in the cliché ways that people often do. I held onto the idea that I was going to be asked too, maybe by someone who had always secretly thought my eyes sparkled under the crappy synthetic lighting of my high school’s hallways. Well, I wasn’t asked, and I went to prom stag in a limo full of my friends and all of their dates determined to have a great time, and I did have a great time, because I told myself that college would be different.
I was going to transform at college like the ugly duckling into a swan. I believed that I would meet a boy who thought I was all the things I knew my sister to be: beautiful, funny, charismatic and worth the effort. I never did meet that guy, but I met someone better… my sister.
I spent my freshman year of college and the three years that followed meeting and learning about strong-willed, passionate, unapologetic and beautiful women: women who deserve to be cherished and celebrated. I sat in classrooms discussing the lives of these women and cheering them on until it hit me — I already knew a woman like this, a woman who deserved the same treatment.
I always knew that Leah was great. I always knew that she was opinionated, hard-working, lovable and courageous, but now, I know I shouldn’t hate her for it. I should celebrate it. I should celebrate her and remind her every day that she is and will always be an important part of my life and the lives of everyone she encounters. I learn something new about her every day. She is much more than her physical appearance in the same way that I am, but I am learning to appreciate her body, the bodies of all women I once aimed to emulate as I fight to love and grow into my own.
I trust her — in a way that I would have never before — with secrets and opinions, with my hopes and dreams. I do my best to tell her she looks great every morning before work, or before she goes out with friends or her boyfriend. I try my best to erase all of the hateful words that spewed from my mouth for all of those years. I know that I can’t take those years back and I will never be able to adequately tell her just how wrong I was and sorry I am for those years I spent hating her, but I hope that this is a start.
Hey Leah, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry, I love you and I will always be in your corner, a green-eyed monster no more.
