I like to think I’m quite cool. Quite. I listen to good music. I read interesting magazines. I use semi-ironic hashtags. I’m also quite fun to hang out with (I hope). Hell, I’ve even got a nose piercing. But there’s one thing that’s been bugging me for, gosh, probably about a decade now. My teenage sisters are cooler than me, and they’re getting cooler by the day.
It’s been a long time coming. I first noticed this development when the eldest of my two sisters was nine and the younger was seven. I was 15, had braces, no boobs, orange-y yellow hair and a wardrobe of questionable clothing. At this point I definitely was not what you would describe as cool, no matter how hard I tried. Anyway. My sisters had found pictures of me, taken four years earlier, with even less boobs, massive teeth, purple flares, giant pink platforms and make-up not dissimilar to Gene Simmon’s. And they were pissing themselves laughing. Yes, aged nine and seven, sat there in their OshKosh dungas, flicking their blonde ringlets around and laughing AT ME. Because they knew what cool looked like and fifteen blissful years of being the eldest, and by default someone they looked up to, had come to a horrible, embarrassing end.
And that was just the beginning. Then came their early-teen belly button piercings, their spot-on-trend Urban Outfitters orders, and the worst – their stern looks of disapproval every time I made even the smallest fashion faux-pas. They were cool, calm and always had their shit together, while I was bashing around feeling awkward, getting too pissed at parties and trying harder and harder to get back to that glorious time when they had respected me, when I had felt like their cool older sister, not some silly bumbling teenage girl.
If you too have siblings that are cooler than you, you’ll recognise these feelings. So let’s share the pain…
1. Every time you try and impress them, they’ll simply nod and smile.
2. Or worse, laugh AT you while sharing knowing looks when you weren’t even trying to be funny.
3. When you were younger, at your parents’ house, your friends always want to hang out with them.
4. At family occasions you get swarmed by relatives telling you how cool your siblings are, and how grown up, and how you were definitely not like that at their age. (Recalling the braces, the orange-y hair and the dreadful fashion faux-pas.)
5. In fact, even your elderly grandparents sense their superiority.
6. You’ll buy a new pair of flatforms, which you think are like, really cool. And they’ll just say ‘Oh yeah, everyone in my year at school has them.’
7. Every now and again you’ll do something that IS actually quite cool, and they’ll look at you with surprise and say, ‘Ha, maybe you are a proper grown-up after all.’
8. But most of the time, even though you’re 26, they’ll enjoy reminding you that you are, absolutely, not a cool grown-up and in their eyes probably never will be.
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Picture: Ada Hamza
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.