Being the younger of the two kids my parents had, I was always rather jealous and envious of my older sister.

My older sister always had the benefit of everything I didn’t. She may feel as if I was our parent’s favorite growing up, but she couldn’t be more wrong. I lived my life in her shadow. Always have, and always will.

Alicia was always the smart one. She still is. Granted I may have a way with words, but this has come with years of practice, and far too many pages I have read of classic literature. She gets so frustrated because I can take a test without studying and still pass. But the true fact is, if I were to study for a test, I’d probably still get the same score as I did when I didn’t study.

She studied so incredibly hard for all of her years in high school and college and did very well. She finished her undergrad in nursing, then became an FNP (Family Nurse Practitioner.)

While she was in college, she often called me in order to evaluate her papers or some sentences she had constructed. Often times, I’d act incredibly annoyed as if she was begging me for a kidney. Truth is, I wasn’t annoyed of having to do it at all. I was flattered, but a little butt-hurt that I had already topped her abilities in constructing sentences in a cohesive manner. I wanted more motivation to become better at that.

So we both went to the same high school and the same college. We both did decently well in our respective fields of study, but I’m still not quite on her level.

Here I am, three weeks’ post-graduation. I have applied for a copious amount of jobs in a multitude of places around the continental United States, yet I have not received even a single phone call for an interview or an email from an interested company.

She had a job lined up months before she graduated from her undergrad. She had multiple job offers before she graduated with her masters. She will forever make significantly more money than I could ever fathom.

She works hard. She’s got the Erickson genes, that’s for sure. But she works hard in other ways that make my hard work seem meaningless. I’m not complaining about my situation, I’m bragging about how awesome my older sister actually is and how this actually makes me strive to be a better contribution to society and to be somewhat close to her level.

She works hard with studying and knowing her crap when it comes time to show that she 100% knows her crap. I work hard with whatever task I have at hand. I don’t do anything that requires memorization. I have had more than likely five or six concussions, and to be quite honest, attempting to memorize anything remotely to what she tries to memorize, I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it.

It’s not even so much her schooling and her professional career that I can’t keep up with. All throughout high school, I was known as "Alicia Erickson’s little brother." She had graduated the year before my little self popped into the big bad high school. As a freshman, sophomore, and junior, I was known as that.

Did it get old? Why yes, yes, it did. After the first three weeks of high school, I realized that I was always going to be in her shadow.

She was the popular girl that every guy liked, not one girl had a problem with, and every single teacher absolutely adored. I finally got to be eliminated from being “Alicia Erickson’s little brother” during my senior year — mainly because nobody else had gone to school with her at that point.

I understand this sounds like a horrible rant, but it’s really not. People tend to chase the superior influences in their lives. I just happen to have lived down the hall from mine growing up.

We laughed and played together as kids, and I am 100% sure I did my job of annoying her. However, through all of the events in our lives, all the ups and downs, I know that my parents are far more proud of who she has become than who I’ve become. That’s okay with me, because it gives me something to strive for. Someone to set the bar to surpass one day.

I’ll find my niche. I’m not worried about that at all, because wherever she goes in her life, I know that sooner or later, I’m not far behind.

I am the pesky little brother that truly admires his older sister, even though we drive each other crazy sometimes.