know it's for the better
postcard 46: on eldest daughter syndrome (part 2), and more thoughts and ruminations on how being the eldest daughter has shaped my life
And the tree was happy. But not really.
prelude
I could hear that it didn’t make sense. As a story, it didn’t make sense. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t read.
—The Idiot, Elif Batuman
This is part 2 to this essay I posted in April, so feel free to read that first! Also, this post is too long to fit into the email, so make sure you read it on the app or your desktop!
A few months ago,
posted an essay on how being the eldest daughter shaped her life & subsequent relationships, and I found each and every sentence deeply resonating with me. Faith is one of the people I talk to a lot about being the eldest daughter (mainly because we both have a 15 year old sister, meaning we almost have a decade apart in age difference). I feel like there’s a different sort of gravity that comes with being the eldest child when your sibling is so much younger, to the point where you can remember every moment of their life.One of the pictures she included was of this specific page in The Giving Tree:
This is what being the eldest daughter sometimes feels like. I’m happy to give, I really am, but sometimes there’s nothing left of me to give. And it feels self-inflicted because nobody tells me to do so. But the way I have trained my brain—for hyper-independence, for self-sufficiency, to be such a well-oiled machine so nobody has to take the time out of their day to lend me a hand—makes it impossible to think there’s another option.
Almost two years ago, in February of 2023, I had a pretty big spiral. I usually get seasonal depressive episodes because so much of my mental health revolves around whether the sun is out, unfortunately. But this one was pretty big, and it took me a good month or two to fully recover—with the outro of Waiting Room by Phoebe Bridgers on repeat in the background while I stared blankly at the ceiling for hours, of course. Once I was feeling relatively okay again, I wrote five and a half pages in my journal, trying to process exactly what had happened in the last two months, which involved a few reckless decisions—incredibly uncharacteristic of me because I am not a reckless person at all. In fact, maybe I can afford to be, a bit more. I tried to comprehend my thoughts and actions—through journaling, through writing it through a character’s eyes of a book I was writing at that time, through a lot of thinking while running miles and miles a day. And in the end, for better or worse, I kind of understood myself.
I was trying to explain this to my friend two months after this all happened. I wasn’t sure if this was normal for other people, or if the fact that I was self aware to a crippling degree, was just a me thing. Before I even talked about it with anybody, I was already cognizant of what had happened and was determined not to let myself make such a mistake again. In my mind, once was a mistake, but twice would be my fault and I’d have no one to blame but myself. In classic me fashion, I did not talk to my friends about this, but rather internalized and intellectualized and rationalized every single thing into oblivion, and then I talked to them when I felt like I had already processed and/or repressed it enough. I always feel like a completely different person when I’m in a depressive episode versus when I’m not, so I can do all three (internalizing, intellectualizing, rationalizing) with ease, because it truly does look like I’m reading about a different person’s life.
I always joke to my close friends that my coping mechanisms are simply repressing and denying—I often think that feelings are inconvenient, that everything needs answers and solutions. I don’t like ever feeling like a burden towards people, especially people that I care about, and I panic when I do, asking and apologizing just in case I ever felt like I was an added weight to their day because that’s the last thing that I’d want. I think it breeds a sort of toxic altruism which is such a strange but logical contradiction to the fact that I’m hyper independent to a fault and I often avoid anything that could cause me to rely on anything other than myself. By extension, I think it’s made me very closed off from most people other than a few I trust completely—I always say that you either know me completely or you don’t at all—and I often hear from people that I’m not close to that they “can’t get a read on me” and I just “kind of seem like a bitch” (actually verbatim).
Deep down, when it’s quiet at night and I’m in the company of my thoughts, I know exactly why this is: I think that being the eldest daughter has conditioned me into thinking that I have to be the one to fix people’s problems. And the best and worst thing about this is that I am good at it. I’m good at hearing out problems and coming up with quick solutions. My friends joke that I’d be the first person they’d call if they needed to get out of jail (FBI, we’re all just kidding). But life to me, is an amalgamation of locks and keys, and I always think that there has to be a match for each. As a child, I loved doing puzzles, or anything that required me to piece parts back together again. Anything that felt broken could be fixed—fixed being the key word.
I’ve often been the invisible hand in situations throughout my life and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy feeling like that, being this glue that holds lives together, being someone who actually has the ability to make a difference in the lives of people I love and care about. But I think not wanting to be a burden and constantly being the person expected to hold things together sometimes alchemizes into something that feels like a bit too much to bear. Even before my sister was born, I was the eldest grandchild, and I was always told by the adults in my family that I had to be the example, the role model. I don’t think I was ever truly treated like a kid, and I remember being nine years old, feeling like the weight of everyone’s expectations was bearing down on my shoulders.
In my mind, this translated to: you have to be perfect. Somehow, as a child, I convinced myself that every single thing I did had to be perfect (“be perfect or don’t bother trying”), and my mind transformed into a panopticon overnight, and I became someone I had to impress at all times. I think I have always struggled with crippling perfectionism all my life, which I have written about in the past. My inability to do things halfway definitely is a byproduct of this. The perfectionism is not even confined to my habits, but the way I view life, as well. In a way, things have always had to be cut and dry for me, and I am still learning how to be okay with things in my life having uncertainties, because some things are out of my control.
The term eldest daughter syndrome has been popularized and used in social media and articles alike; there seems to be a general societal consensus that there is a certain universal feeling that is associated with being the eldest sibling—the eldest daughter, in particular. The feeling of being a child but also responsible for this child who is not quite yours but not quite not yours; feeling like a third parent and babysitter at the same time; feeling like because you remember every single moment of your sibling’s life, you are responsible for every moment after as well. The parentification of the eldest seems like such a normal and natural thing that I often feel weird articulating it in this manner. A few weeks ago, my friend described this as a “return on investment”, and in the most rudimentary way, he wasn’t wrong. I guess in the most cynical light, everything at its core can be seen as a transaction no matter how much we imbue feelings into it.
Over the years, my sister has transformed into a tiny baby I had to hold carefully in my arm while learning to support her head and neck, to someone who is taller than me and I can actually talk about things with. It sometimes feels like double vision, and when I look at her, I see her at fifteen but her at every age before that as well, and I get a muted ache in my chest that I can’t quite explain. I remember when I asked my mother about it a few years ago, she said it is the same feeling she gets when she looks at the both of us. In a way, I guess I have unwittingly become a pseudo-parent, for better or for worse.
It would be foolish to place every single personality trait of mine on being the eldest daughter, but it has heavily shaped how I view myself and others around me through the years. That title seems to form the basis of how I view relationships and how I meet new people. I realized a few months ago that all of my best friends are the eldest sibling, and more than half of them have a sibling who is over six years apart in age difference. I seek comfort in familiarity, and similarity breeds familiarity, so I guess it is something I have naturally gravitated toward—people who can understand the same feeling of the often crushing responsibility of being the eldest, especially when it comes to younger siblings.
In the last week, I have possibly been the most sick I have ever been. I don’t want to go into much detail, but I have never experienced something like this and I didn’t even know that feeling this horrible was possible (and I’ve had pneumonia five times). From being physically sick in three different ways to suffering from debilitating sleep deprived anxiety (an understatement), I have felt incredibly helpless, which is terrifying for me, because I would never normally use the word helpless to describe myself. It has resulted in me needing a lot of help, and having to ask for help—something that I seldom ever do, especially when it comes to help with anything internal. Not feeling guilty after asking for help is its own issue, and I found myself continuously feeling horrible that someone has to take the time out of their day to be there for me, even though I have been reassured again and again that this is not the case at all. Learning to let someone worry about me and letting myself be helped has been a learning curve, but I think I’ll get it, eventually.
A lot of my twenties have been about trying to detach all of these stubborn traits that have been fused into my personality and philosophy. Life should not be about having to shoulder and weather burdens alone; for someone who has such a big support system network, from close friends to family, I’m not exactly sure why I’ve hot-iron-rod branded myself into thinking that while I’m more than happy to be there for my friends and how dealing with their problems never feel like a burden to me, mine would feel like a Herculean effort to anyone being there for me in that moment. I think about this in reverse—if any of my friends were in my current situation, I would have been more than happy to drop everything to help them, and I would never even for a second think it was a burden. So why do the thoughts in my brain wire differently when it’s about me?
I used to pride myself on being hyper independent in my teens. I went to boarding school for high school, and being successfully independent seemed like the most important thing in life. My sister was a baby back then and I didn’t want my parents to have to worry about me at the same time as my sister. I was never really treated like a child, so being an adult, or what I thought was similar to being an adult, didn’t require much effort. But now all of these traits that I thought were my strongest strengths haunt me in the dead of the night when I’m awake at 3am, staring at the ceiling, feeling an insurmountable loneliness barrel into the center of my chest.
I love being an older sister, and I do usually enjoy being the eldest. I joke to my friends all the time that my control freak tendencies (that used to singlehandedly do every group project by myself in school) could not have handled having someone older than me tell me what to do. And so much of my happiness in my life comes from being capable of helping my family and best friends. Ironically, I do prioritize myself a lot, always thinking of my best interests first and foremost. But oftentimes, I do feel like the Giving Tree, where I feel like I’ve depleted everything that I could ever do for anyone and I don’t have enough left for me. It’s self inflicted, of course, but I’ve realized that it is not a very sustainable way to live either.
There’s a quote I really love from Conversations with Friends that I personally find comforting (the consensus has been very split on this among my friends), so take it with a grain of salt, but I’d like to end with it:
interlude i: what i read this week
I’m slowly getting back into the groove of my normal routine, which is super exciting for me because it feels like I’ve been feeling unmoored since November of last year. I am still reading War and Peace (slowly and steadily; we’re on part 2 of volume 2 which is a pretty big dent!), and it is so good. I’m enjoying every part of it—the Russian elite society gossip and the battlefield scenes alike. Tolstoy’s writing is addictive and enchanting and witty. Here is one of my favorite paragraphs I’ve read so far that made it into my quote glossary on my notes app:
“In a clock the complex action of countless different wheels works its way out in the even, leisurely movement of hands measuring time; in a similar way the complex action of humanity in those 160,000 Russians and Frenchmen – all their passions, longings, regrets, humiliation and suffering, their rushes of pride, fear and enthusiasm – only worked its way out in defeat at the battle of Austerlitz, known as the battle of the three Emperors, the slow tick-tock of the age-old hands on the clock face of human history.”
I actually managed to read two other books this week, squeezed between meetings and time on trains. They’re both short, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. I read The Nose by Nikolai Gogol which was such a genius short story that only takes an hour to read. I also read Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, which has been on my reading list forever. I’m so glad I finally read it, because it was so gorgeously written and had me questioning the entire book in the end (the best feeling). Both are under 100 pages, so I highly recommend them if you’re short on time!
Here are ten articles and essays to read this week:
The Rejection Plot by Tony Tulathimutte
“Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown.”
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The piece of writing advice that still troubles me.
The Flavor of Mechanization by Massimo Mazzotti
Olive oil was revered and cherished by the ancients. But its distinctive peppery taste is really a modern invention.
The After Dark Bandit by Andrew Dubbins
The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.
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On rediscovering intimacy with personal spaces.
Fear as a Game by Elisa Gabbert
What can the philosophy of games tell us about our odd impulse to scare ourselves?
Ego Death by
Unsolicited advice, session 01: on how to stop being a narcissist.
The mid in fake midcentury modern.
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“Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, insomnia without end.”
What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet by Kathryn Schulz
Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?
interlude ii: what i watched this week
A two week roundup because I watched a lot of movies in the last week of December (the way god intended). I watched twelve movies (see below). Most of them were winter-y rewatches because winter is movie watching season, but some were 2024 releases I had been meaning to get to for a while. I watched Nosferatu in the theaters, specifically the Music Box theater in Chicago—the beautiful interior was so perfect for watching it, and it was probably one of, if not my favorite movie of 2024. I was absolutely floored at the beautiful cinematography and also everyone’s acting; it was truly Robert Eggers at this best.
I also really enjoyed Conclave and Anora, and I’m happy to have gotten through my annual future list of what I’m assuming will be Oscar nominated movies. Love Actually has always been my winter travel plane movie, and I’ve loved it for a long time, but watching it on a bigger screen made me realize that it kind of…sucked, which was a bit disappointing. I watched other winter/Christmas classics as well, like The Holdovers, It’s a Wonderful Life, Little Women, and The Grand Budapest Hotel—all of which have been my favorites since their release (or in the case of It’s A Wonderful Life, since I first watched it when I was a child). I watched Hundreds of Beavers for the first time and played a game where my friend and I took a large sip of alcohol every time we saw a beaver…you can guess how drunk we were by the end of Hundreds of Beavers—but it was such a good movie (maybe a few scenes are fuzzy in my mind).
postlude
things i love: making elaborate sandwiches, new year organization, twg tea, byredo’s choco mascarpone candle (best best best winter candle ever), my bottega veneta hop that i can finally wear with a sweater the way it deserves to be worn, writing postcards (a real postcards by elle, if you will).
I felt every bit of this. and now I am crying at 9 am. but yeah. thank you for making me feel less alone rn
saw the title on the notification, sighed, opened this up knowing it would be absolutely devastating, loved it