Bigs-to-be out there, this one's for you. With "Little-Hunting" season well underway, I keep hearing one phrase passed back and forth among the potential bigs: "but she's just so... different from me!"
Hear ye well, younger members, because this savvy (read: obnoxious) senior has been there, and is about to spit some home truths about why that's not a bad thing.
Two years ago, I fell in sister-love with my soon-to-be little on our very first Starbucks date. From that October day onward, I knew she was the one. It wasn't that she was a clone of me, unlike the way the rest of my pledge class talked about their rush crushes. We had some common interests, sure, like Harry Potter and corny puns, but other than that we were day and night. She was the golden-haired girl: a heavily-recruited triple legacy who ran 5 miles every day; never drank; never partied; and was an all-around angel. I, on the other hand, was sort of a weirdo. I had been the outsider spring pledge who no one quite knew what to with: I was socially awkward, cursed like a sailor, chugged cranberry vodkas, and couldn't tell you which was darker: my eyeliner or my attitude. She was sunshine, and I was a thunderstorm.
I cried actual happy tears when I got the official phone call that said I had been first on her list. I couldn't believe that someone like her wanted someone like me to be her big. We weren't "basically the same person" like so many other big-little pairs were, but it worked (and continues to do so). Our differences served as a balance, and that balance kept me in check.
One night, I found myself as one often does: Drunk in a bathroom before winter formal. I grabbed the sink to steady myself, and turned my face to the mirror. I stared deep into my own bleary eyes and told myself firmly: "Get it together. Get it together, or you won't be allowed on the bus. But don't do it for you; because a standards hearing would serve you right. Do it for her."
Guess what? It worked. Her non-partying ways kept me in check at functions, because I was determined to keep her respect. When she got too tightly wound about house politics, I was there with a joke about why it didn't matter. Cheesy as it sounds to admit it, someone like me really needed someone like her, even if I didn't realize it at first.
Last night, I got an excited text about my new great-grand-little, and it occurred to me how far we had come. We built our own little fam from the ground up, and two different kinds of brick made the house that much stronger. So, to my new bigs out there, sometimes it isn't about how you are alike. It's how you are not alike that can be the backbone of a sisterhood.
