Have you ever strived to be "better" than your sibling? Tried to achieve greater heights than them, accumulate more positive feedback? We've all seen this at least to some extent in our lives, even if it didn't happen to us directly. "Joey was such an excellent athlete, so we expect our Christopher to be just as wonderful as he was." Sound familiar? Siblings, it seems, constantly try to be one rung higher than the other on the ladder of social status, whether among family or their peers. If the older sibling was the favorite, the younger one wants nothing more than to follow in their sibling's footsteps and be the favorite as well. Hand-me-downs, reputations, and expectations are passed from generation to generation within a family. But when does this hierarchy become a cloning of the same type of person, over and over? How does a child find themself when they try to achieve perfection of another persona altogether? The simple statement could be that they don't, and end up losing themselves in the whole process. They struggle with what their own dreams and goals are, because they simply can't identify the difference between their own and a sibling's. Yet, when have you ever seen two siblings exactly alike? Even twins have very different personalities and styles, once they become of the age when matching jumpsuits and sweaters become more Goodwill than "good taste." To put it into more tangible form, as two snowflakes drift down from the heavens, they seem uniform at first, but at a second glance, they are completely different, with their own crystalized patterns of beauty. So, no matter what we humans might set upon our kin to strive for, the only way to achieve a balance is to find interests and self-sufficiency without having to feed off a sibling like a leech to a rather porous wound.
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