June 12, 2007
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one of my practice personal statements that i forgot to relate about myself, and its about 4 times as long as it should have been -.--
I love my brother more than I love anyone else, yet we don’t really talk much, and when we do it seems routine or superficial. Perhaps further confusing to me is why so many of my friends and their siblings get along well and get along so well that they are practically best friends who tell each other everything and could talk about anything for any length of time. I thought perhaps it is the age difference, for my brother is an entire seven years older than me. On second thought, a couple of my friends who get along just fine with their siblings have a nearly as large age difference as well. Another possible reason I’ve thought up of was perhaps it is because we were both males and intimate friendship doesn’t usually occur with two males. But again, I know of many friends who have an older or younger brother and they get along like best friends do.
Back when I was very young, too young to know much better, I always thought my brother really hated me, and he did, for some time when he was young. When I was born, my brother was a little under seven years old, a still quiet young age that would still be in need of a motherly figure. However, once I was born, my mother began to neglect to care for my brother as much as she cared for me, as often happens to most families in which more than one child is born. As a result, ever since I was born, my brother detested me, envied me, and above all was extremely jealous. I was not to blame, it is understandable, but we were both young and naive. My brother would often bully me, pick on me, and occasionally punch me whenever I commit an act of stupidity, or did something wrong. Of course I would do what all toddlers do when bullied, I cried, and when that happened my mother would come and comfort me, and reprimand my brother. This, as I later on learned, further increased my brother’s animosity toward me. He would constantly hurt me again and again. It took me a while to realize, but I realized that, no matter how much he hurt me, how much it scared me when he got mad at me, I never hated him. I would only become frightened or guilty, but I would never hate him, in fact I looked up to him ever since I was born.
This cycle didn’t really change much as we grew older because he simply got stronger while I got bigger, meaning he could hit me even harder. It wasn’t until high school when he couldn’t bully me as much because of the workload. He had a prospective future. He was getting good grades and scored 1420 on the SAT on his first try. Then all of a sudden in 11th grade drama happened with a girl and his best friend and he became emotional. Except with him he didn’t simply get depressed and lament about it everyday. He would unleash it in anger, having a short temper. He started getting into fights and everything went downhill. All throughout this time I was still myself, naive and unknowing, being eight or nine years old. I recall that every single day, my father would come home, and walk past my mother, walk past me, and go directly to my brother to check in on him, and talk to him. Being spoiled as the youngest son is, I was extremely jealous, and once I summed up enough confidence to mention this to my mother, who of course transferred it to my father. My father tried to explain to me how my brother was at the critical time of his childhood and his future is at stake, but I was too young to understand anything, so I just nodded and waved him off naively.
My brother’s grades dropped drastically, he got lots of C’s and even occasional D’s. He would get into fights when he wasn’t home and often had run-ins with the deans. He broke his pinky finger twice but never mentioned it to my parents until years later. Apparently he jammed it back to the original position and it somewhat attempted to heal on its own, but his hand would always shake and would occasionally hurt even today. From then on he started to smoke and even drink and had some sort of relationship with gangs. Whether or not he was actually in a gang I didn’t know. But ever since he’s been on a decline. When senior year rolled around, and my father made him ready his application, and attempted to prepare him to take the SAT I again, a year after he took it the first time. He signed up, but he never showed up at the test. In the end he still got into UCD and UCSB, with all those poor grades, yet had a decent SAT score, which could have been better had he taken the test. He decided to go to PCC instead to attempt to transfer to a better college but in the end he transferred to UCSB anyway, and basically wasted two more years of his life.
One night, while I was still in my middle school years, it was just like any other day, I was sleeping when my brother came into my room and nudged me. It was too dark to see but his voice seemed disconcerted and his shadow depicted a slouched figure with his hands on his knees. And then he spoke to me, “Look man, work hard, and study. Do well in school. Dude, don’t be like me and mess up. Like, you don’t want to regret your entire life for not working hard.”
In the middle of this he stuttered and sniffled. Then I realized he was crying the entire time. My brother never cries.
“Listen to mom and dad, and like, don’t be stupid like me. Look I know I don’t really treat you really well, and I used to hurt you a lot, but you know. Honestly, I really care a lot about you. I love you.”
He got up and then left the room.
It was the most impacting day of my entire life, and as I looked at the clock, it was three AM in the morning. Again, we never really talked a lot before, and if we did it was usually a comical conversion or one about games. Most of the time we didn’t even talk to each other unless we had to. I was always pretty lonely and that probably explains why I loved my brother so much despite the fact that it didn’t seem like we were even close friends. The one person who I always looked up to, loved the most out of all the people I knew, and would always love him no matter what he does, just came in and emotionally poured out his soul to me and told me probably what I always wanted to hear and needed to hear, those last two sentences. I cried myself to sleep.
The next day I learned from my mom that he was drunk and had came home at three AM in the morning after being in a car accident. It was then when he got his first DUI, and wasn’t able to drive for two years. After two and a half years he got his second DUI, and ever since then he’s been on a decline in his life. Despite the fact that he continued to decline in his life, I could see him struggle, day by day to reform, constant reminders would strike him again and again about how much potential he had, and how much he gave away. Reminders like one of his best friends who graduated from Berkeley and is about to get married with a high paying salary. Reminders such as another one of his friends already married and about to have a child. And I see him constantly struggling, trying to quit smoking, to quit drinking, only to pick them up shortly after. Always saying that he’ll quit but never actually quitting. And then after six years of college and he finally graduated from UCSB, he got a job.
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