My World Got Shook
It’s funny how you think you know someone, especially your own family. Then one day, boom, a piece of information just lands in your lap and everything kinda tilts. That’s what happened to me a while back. Found out something about my sister. Something big.
Honestly, my first reaction? Not pretty. A whole mix of stuff. Confusion, mostly. Then came the, I guess, judgment? Yeah, probably. It’s hard to admit, but there it is. It felt like a punch to the gut. My sister, you know? The one I grew up with, shared secrets with. It was a lot to process, and my initial way of “practicing” how to deal with it was just… shock.
Wrestling With It
So, I did what I usually do when I’m thrown for a loop. I clammed up at first. Avoided. Pretended it wasn’t real. But that doesn’t work, does it? It just sits there, festering. I spent a lot of nights just staring at the ceiling, replaying conversations, memories, trying to see if I missed something. Was she okay? Was she happy? A million questions, and I was too tangled up in my own head to ask any of them directly. That was the start of my real practice – trying to untangle my own feelings.
My “practice,” if you wanna call it that, really kicked off with me trying to just… breathe. And then, trying to unlearn some of my own built-in ideas about things. About people, about choices, about what’s “right” or “wrong.” It wasn’t about her “job” so much as it was about her, and about me and my reaction. It was a tough look in the mirror, let me tell you. I had to record my own biases before I could even start to see clearly.
I started to really think about what autonomy means. What making your own way looks like. It’s easy to sit on a high horse when it’s not your life, not your choices. I had to keep reminding myself that she’s an adult. She has her reasons. And maybe, just maybe, those reasons are none of my damn business unless she decides to share them. That was a hard pill to swallow, but a necessary part of the process.
This whole journey, it wasn’t like a straight line. More like a messy scribble. There were specific stages I went through, and I tried to keep a sort of mental record:
- Days I was angry, or just deeply sad for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down.
- Days I felt like a massive hypocrite for even having an opinion. Who was I to judge?
- Days I genuinely just wanted to understand her world, even a tiny bit, without my preconceived notions clouding everything.
I tried to put myself in her shoes, even if I couldn’t really imagine walking that path. That was the hardest part of the practice: letting go of my picture of who she “should” be and trying to see who she actually is.
Finding a Different Kind of Peace
So where am I now with all this? Well, things aren’t magically “fixed” because nothing was “broken” in the way I first thought. What changed was me. My perspective. I learned to practice listening, really listening, when she did talk – not always about the specifics, because that’s still her boundary and I respect that, but about her life, her feelings, her day. And I started to see her, really see her, as the strong, complicated, and frankly, pretty damn resilient person she is. She’s got more guts than I gave her credit for.
I’m not gonna lie, it’s still a journey. Some days are easier than others. But the biggest thing I’ve recorded from this whole experience, the main takeaway from my practice, is that judgment is easy. It’s a default setting. Understanding, true understanding, takes real work. It takes stepping outside yourself, your comfort zone, your neat little boxes. And sometimes, the most important practice is learning to accept people for who they are, not who you wish they were.
It made me look at my own life, my own choices, and the masks we all wear. We’re all just trying to make it, you know? My way of “making it” is different from hers. And that’s okay. The “practice” continues, I guess. The practice of being a better brother, a better human. Still a work in progress, but aren’t we all? Sharing this is part of that record, hoping maybe someone else gets something from it too.
