Something for My Sister

My entire life has been an incredible journey bringing me to where I am today and who I am today. Recently, I’ve made the conscious decision to really start following my passions and pursuing my Personal Legend, as expressed by one of my favorite authors Paulo Coelho. For me, this means arts and crafts of multiple sorts! I’ve taken great interest in expressing myself through things I can create or even repurpose since I can remember including but not limited to making origami from magazine pages, making paintings three dimensional with beads, pipe cleaners, or whatever is around, refurbishing a piece of furniture in rough shape, etc. Every time I have ever created a piece of art, it has come out perfectly. By that, I mean I expressed myself exactly the way I needed to and felt the love that was poured into the project, which to me means it was a success thus perfect. Also, with humility I say, I am a decently well-rounded individual and have been for much of my life. This will come to a head later on and challenge one of the relationships in closest proximity to me.

I have two younger siblings: a brother and a sister; I am the eldest. From the outside (and I can admit from the inside as well) I was treated as and viewed as ‘the golden child’, and I lived it up. I got great grades all the time while my younger siblings got average grades. I was a top athlete in all the sports I did while my younger siblings did physical activities that weren’t as widely regarded as sports such as recreational skateboarding and recreational dance. I was very physically fit while my younger siblings struggled with their weight. My family and I are black; my whole life I’ve had 3b curly brown hair that falls to my chest and a caramel skin tone whereas my sister, the middle child, has 4b coiled black hair that has never touched her shoulders and an espresso skin tone. Hopefully, I have begun to paint a picture of how the world looks at (and treated) me in comparison to my siblings, namely my sister. Many of the things I enjoy and have been praised for, I have enjoyed and been praised for my entire life. The broken relationship that exists between my sister and I has also lasted our entire lives. I’ve always obliviously, and more so frivolously, wondered why our relationship wasn’t a pleasant one and why she didn’t ever seem to like me. There’s a full story of all our unhappy exchanges, but this is a story with a happy ending and happy characters. Unfortunately and regrettably, it has taken me my entire life up until late to take a step back and put into perspective what it must have felt like for her with the circumstances aforementioned.

In following my passions, I’ve been trying all sorts of different crafts that I’ve never done before to push my limits and improve my skills. In pursuing my Personal Legend, I’ve swallowed my pride and consciously decided I want a good working relationship with my sister and am determined to take accountability and make it happen. My sister’s birthday passed at the end of May; when I went to text her ‘happy birthday’ since she lives in another state than I (no, I had no intention of a phone call or facetime), I saw that the only times we ever communicated was in fact to send the bland, once-a-year birthday text. My heart broke, but I sent the text anyway. It seems that fate, or a divinely timed ad on Instagram, wanted to help me out a bit and brought this Create Your Happiness challenge before me, and instantly I knew I would seize the opportunity to combine a genuine intention to building a positive working relationship that I’ve never enjoyed with my sister and an objective to develop my craft! I took a leap texting her again twice in one year asking about her day and finally got around to asking for photos of her room as I had concluded I would make her a [late] birthday gift to go in her room, and our communication could bloom from there because I planned on only giving our relationship the tlc it needed to grow. She sent the photos of a cutely designed monochromatic room. I planned to make her a monochromatic latch-hook rug to match her bedroom; I’d never made a rug or latch-hooked anything other than my hair before.

So, I made my first rug and spoke to my sister more than once in the year and actually talked with her for the first time since we were children; we are now both over 21. I’m super proud of the project I began, and the rug looks pretty cute, too. Just kidding! All jokes aside, I thought making the rug as a birthday gift for her would be equal parts family kindling and equal parts skill expansion, but when I finished I was just so excited to be able to have another reason to talk to my sister, although shamefully behind my ego. My sister and I now speak a few times a week! That is a long way from exclusively texting on birthdays. My heart is so full that I was able to turn something that I love doing into efforts to bring me closer to someone I love but have not previously properly loved. They say with all that you do, do with love. I am so thankful for this challenge in that it has challenged me to extend that love beyond my hands in material objects to my heart with my sister and more.