I grew up with an older sister, two years older to be exact, so just old enough to make a difference. Everything I went to do as a kid, my older sister had already done. Talk about creating a shadow that's hard to escape. Just like plants need sunshine to grow, children need attention to grow. So if my sister was going to overshadow me in everything I tried to do then I would just have to find a way to escape that shadow. How did I do this you might ask? Well, it involved a lot of studying.
I decided that if she was going to take all of the classes that I would have to take then I would have to do better at them. So, I spent hours upon hours studying to get all A's and be on the honor roll every single semester to gain my parents' attention. Of course, I never realized that by doing this I was forcing my sister into my shadow academically. Recently, I learned that we were overshadowing each other in different ways, my sister and me.
My parents were both athletic in their childhoods, my dad was a wrestler and track star, and my mom was a basketball player and cross country runner. So, when my sister joined the cross country and track teams in middle and high school I felt like my parents could relate to her more in an athletic sense. Feeling disconnected from my family in this way made me turn towards artistic pursuits. I joined art classes, cooking classes, sewing classes and excelled at all of them. However, when my sister took these types of classes I began to feel like she was intruding on my artistic pursuits, which I later realized was one of the ways I forced her into my shadow.
You would think we grew out of those bad habits, but college surprisingly didn't help considering I chose to attend the same college that she went to and then inadvertently joined the same clubs that she was in or had been in. When I first got to ISU I didn't intend to do the same things as her, it just kind of happened that way. For instance, I didn't plan on joining a sorority at first and I definitely didn't plan to join the same one that my sister was in. But when I arrived at ISU, I decided that I wanted to join a sorority because it looked really fun and when I went through recruitment Tri Sigma felt like family, and it might have been partially because my sister was already a member of Tri Sigma. So I joined the same sorority as my sister, then I joined a mental health organization called Semis because one of my best friends from camp is the vice president, not knowing that my sister had been a member last year. And finally I joined the Odyssey because I love to write, but the Vidette was too much of a time commitment for me, even though I knew that my sister had been a previous creator.
So after 19 years of living with her, I've decided there's no one else in the world that I'd rather mimic than my big sister, Hayley Eggimann.
