Missing One Scale

A. Shaunard
9-25-2007
Missing one scale: Knowing your own Potential

I looked around for the fallen pieces of my fort and tried to gather them together quickly before my front was attacked. He’d ruined the left wall of my fort and was taking full advantage, winding up and firing all his ammo in my direction. I was completely exposed and unable to counter without anything protecting me.
“Hey, stop it until I get my fort put back up! That’s not fair!” I screamed.
“You can’t just call time out because I’m winning, Callie. That’s stupid.”
I pushed all the pillows back together and stuffed the inconsistencies in the wall of polyester with Beanie Babies. My brother, Derik, continued to pelt me just to get his point across, but he knew that if he gave me too much lip I’d just go back to my room and stop playing. We had been warring with Beanie Babies, a battle game we’d invented, and were reaching the end of the war’s duration. We always built our “forts”, short walls we constructed in the frames of our bedroom doors with pillows and stuffed animals, before we started so that we’d be prepared for the onslaught of beanbag terror. We had been at it for roughly an hour and we were already out of breath. Some days we had a lot of energy, so the fight was extra intense, and today we were sweating like miners.
I sat on my knees with my back to Derik. Looking around at him, I penetrated him with an intense glare and stuck out my tongue, only to find that he, too, was making the same face at me.

This is one of the memories that I cherish the most from my childhood. When I was technically a “kid”, my brother was my hero. I knew in my heart that he wasn’t the coolest person ever, but I thought he was, and that was all that I cared about.
Now that we’ve both grown up with different friends and different goals, we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. He has become a conservative, money-oriented person with no sense of adventure but an uncanny aptitude for networking, and I’m an artist and a writer with no job and a lot of misdirected passion. It was hard for me, the younger sister who idolized him so much, to see that Derik was just a person who made as many mistakes as I did, and it was ten times that hard to come to terms with it.
When he first went to college, I was just starting my senior year in high school. I had an overwhelming case of “senioritis”, the name given by teenagers to the stir-craziness that comes from being in school for too long without graduating, and so I observed Derik’s behaviors throughout that first year with special interest. We stopped getting along really well when he first got into high school, so we’d known for quite a while that our friendship had a lot of limitations.
I’m sure it seemed to him like he called me enough, maybe just enough to prevent him from feeling guilty, but I wanted more. My desire was not for Derik’s company, but for knowledge of what college life was going to be like. I needed to know that there was life after grade school, and rumor told me that it was going to be marginally more bearable. I got through my senior year based on that knowledge.
When I finally got the opportunity to visit him for two days, I snapped it up with gusto. The plan was that I’d ride the Amtrak train from Raleigh to Charlotte and he’d pick me up at the station. I was pleased to know that I’d see Derik for the first time in nearly three months, but I was much more excited to be escaping. I was going somewhere new. Charlotte was somewhere I could feel independent.
At that point, I was unable to feel much confidence because I was so many different people. I had a personality for every day of the week and was convinced that I could only have one that I really stuck to. This was what growing up was to me.
Westward I rode, into a heavy veil of rain. I looked at the strings of light and dark outside of the window, wondering if Derik would have his usual effect on me. He was the prodigal child in my family, and it always tended to make me lose my footing. When he solved a problem, I was just figuring out that it would present a problem. When I was struggling to make friends he was going to a lot of parties. When he was filling out applications, I had just started thinking about the reality of college.
Not only was he ahead of me because of our age difference, but he was more impressive overall. Most of the careers I had in mind for myself involved being poor for a long period of time, such as writing and acting, and he’d wanted to be an engineer since he got his first Legos. He was involved in a lot of church functions, and we stopped getting along mainly because I told my family that I didn’t think I was ready to be religious and didn’t think that I’d ever be involved in a conventional religion. I also came out as a lesbian sixteen years into my life.
Now, as I was riding this metal serpent into what could possibly be hell, I became overwhelmingly depressed. I hated to compare myself to him, but it was difficult not to when we’d been raised in essentially the same environment by the same people and spent all of our youth together. Every theory of parenting says that I’m the youngest sibling so I should be a selfish, attention-seeking brat, and because he’s the oldest he should be a control freak and a perfectionist. Luckily I don’t place much faith in the “self-help” genre, so I don’t believe that’s the case. There must have been some incident, some accident that came between us for good.
When I got to the train station, it had stopped raining, but the moisture still hung oppressively above the passengers in sheets. I took off my glasses to clean the mist knowing that this was a precursor to my weekend.
With my glasses back on my face, I saw that Derik was thirty feet away from me, standing tall over a row of bench seats. He always appeared antsy and out of place, and today was no exception. I approached him and hugged him, fitting nicely beneath his outstanding chin. He obviously still didn’t know how to hug me.
It was quite awkward, and after the initial meeting we had to stand in line to get my luggage, where we still didn’t seem to have anything to say. Regardless, though, I was happy to see him and I knew he felt the same.
When we got to the school, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Bodily, I was exhausted and stiff from the train ride, but I was finally free to do what I wished. Where was one to start when they enter Candyland?

Actually, when I stayed with Derik that weekend, I realized that college was perfect…if you were my brother. I was disappointed with the life that a college student has to lead to be successful, and I very quickly understood why most of the careers I dreamed of having didn’t require a college education. It’s incredibly overrated. Now, that certainly isn’t to say that I don’t want to further my education. That would be stupid. No, it became overrated when teenagers began to think that they had to go to college to survive, that they couldn’t live a complete, happy life without it. People have become terminally anxious, even suicidal, because of an imminent fear of failure. I know my saying so isn’t going to make college any less competitive or any less difficult or expensive. I just want to give more credit to people who choose not to go to college.
Derik is doing well in college because of the type of person he is: social, confident, single-minded, and conservative. That’s great, and I’m very proud of him. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to operate well this way.
The trip turned out to be a drag, but I’m certain that I learned a few things. I ended up hanging out alone as much as I possibly could, simply for the sake of personal space. I’d spend time with Derik alone, and I’d spend time with his friends, but I preferred to spend time on my own, contemplating. Sitting in his room while he took a shower, I cracked the window and rolled a joint. He lives on the seventh floor of the Scott building, so I looked out and thought about my different personalities.
Why did I need to pick one? Maybe I could live without having a specific mold. There must be a way that I can utilize each and every one of them to their full advantage and still be able to compose my social life. I understood that I was proud of my different faces, and instead of my original assumption that they would hinder me. I decided at that moment that I loved them. My ability to be a chameleon has made me the person I am, and I didn’t have to be like my brother. In fact, I was perfect. I can’t control whether Derik and I get along, but I can control myself and my own happiness.