Meeting someone who’s better than you at everything is aggravating. What’s worse is when that person is your younger sibling. The phrase “sibling rivalry” is around for a reason. Siblings have been at odds with each other since basically forever (see: the story of Cain and Abel from Genesis. TL;DR: Cain kills Abel because Abel was better than Cain).
My brother and I are no different. We fight pretty much constantly. In public, I irritate him and smother him with affection. In private, we’ve had screaming matches where I end up hoarse from blowing my voice out.
It's tough being the older sibling to someone who's good at everything. My brother is super good in school, he has tons of friends, he's athletic, he's kind, and he seems to have it all together. When you're the older sibling, you're supposed to be better at things, simply from greater experience. No one expects me to be better than my younger sibling at everything but also no one expects me to be worse than him at most things.
I don't even know where this "pressure to be better" is coming from; it's not coming from my parents or the adults around us. I think this pressure is just deeply rooted in sibling rivalry, and I'm torn between jealousy and pride.
Despite and through all of this, I love him to the moon and back.
In an effort to show this and demonstrate how incredibly awesome my brother is (and that I have no hard feelings), I’ve compiled a list of things he does better than I do:
Soccer
The kid’s a stud. I don’t know a ton about soccer but I know he’s good, and he loves it more than basically everything. Honestly, let’s add all the sports in here. Basketball, cross country, baseball, you name it, he’s better at it than I am.
Anything that takes physical effort, honestly
Mowing the lawn, moving heavy objects, getting the mail, climbing a tree, etc. He can do all those things far more quickly than I can (and it seems effortless.)
History class
UGH. It’s not difficult to be better than me at history. I’m so bad at it. I actually love sitting in a lecture class, but no matter what kind of notes I take I still can’t summarize what I’ve learned. Taking exams and writing in-class timed-essays in history classes has always been an absolute nightmare for me. My brother, though he has the same problem, has found a way to study that actually works for him. The other day he came up with the beginning and ending years of the Black Plague. Seriously.
Making friends
Don’t get me wrong; I have lots of friends from all over the place and I love them all dearly, but man is my brother good at making friends. He’s honestly amazing. He’s got friends who were in choir with him, or theater, or soccer at school, or rec soccer, or select soccer, or classes at school. He’s friends with some geeks, some jocks, some popular kids, and lots of people in between. I have about three people I still talk to from high school. It’s sad.
Dating
I almost didn’t mention this one, but here it is. He’s had a girlfriend. I haven’t had a boyfriend. (Curious? See this article).
Video games
Don't get me started. I'm so mad. I introduced him to a game and hours later he had already surpassed my highest level by about 20 levels. I think he's currently over 100 levels ahead of me.
Remembering vital information about book, comic book, video game, or movie characters
It gets very frustrating for him when he has to explain and re-explain and re-explain to me who Nightwing (for example) is. I only just figured out the difference between Deadpool and Deadshot: different universes, for one thing. I think he just about died when I referred to Astromech Droids (I find his lack of faith in my Star Wars knowledge disturbing). But seriously, he can quote entire paragraphs from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Today, he was giving descriptions of each of the Weasleys word-for-word from the Harry Potter books, from memory. Legendary.
Given enough time, I could double, triple, quadruple the length of this list. It baffles me every day how talented my brother is. He’s kind and empathetic, smart, capable, and strong. Only recently did he grow taller than me, but I’ve been living in his shadow for almost 17 years. Never change, buddy. Never change.
