God, I love my sister so much. Last night I talked to her for about 2 and a half hours, just truly talking. It was one of those wonderfully bittersweet life moments.
So I've mentioned this before, but my sister is an absolutely gorgeous girl, who is sweet and kind, brilliant and funny. She truly has it all. But for some reason, she just can't see it. She is plagued by doubt about everything, and in her words is just so very lonely. She is close to me and my step-brother, but that's no substitute for friends her own age, which... well, she just doesn't have. She is a deep person, caring about those in need in not just a sympathetic way, but truly empathetic. So it doesn't help that most of the girls and guys around here are as shallow and stuck up as they come. It's a community with a large, and very binary, divide between the rich white island brats, and far poorer, primarily black and Latino, kid on the mainland. But they all go to the same high school, because there is not one on the island. She doesn't have anything in common with the island kids, but yet because she is a pretty white girl everyone else assumes she's just another one of them, so she's stuck, unwanted by either group. In a desperate attempt just to make a friend to talk to, she started talking to a boy she met at some summer College experience "camp". She just wanted a friend, he had ideas of more. I'll skip the details (nothing salacious, they only met in person for a whole 5 minutes), but that went sour (in a completely innocent way) and he was just another in a long line of "failed" friendships. After radio silence for a few months, the guy randomly messages her and starts talking to her again and she thinks "Oh, he took everything to heart maybe and this time I can just have a friend to talk to again". I don't think I even really need to say not much had changed.
So last night, she comes to me asking for advice about sending a text to him, sort of confronting him about some stuff from before and from now because he was doing it again. (Suffice to say, while a lot of it isn't really a big deal unless you're a teenager, there was one thing he did that was a 100% jerk move that impacted her in the real world that was completely a big deal, and she had a very good reason to be irritated with him.) We wound up just talking. About her need to confront him, about her loneliness and fear that she would always be lonely, about how she felt when people called her stupid because all they could see was a pretty girl that didn't fit the stereotype for being smart (and she wondering if they were right, despite the fact she is easily smarter than 99% of them by even official testing standards), about all sorts of things. I told her a bit about some of what I've read on this forum (in very broad strokes), about people dealing with their marriages or relationships while coming out, maintaining friendships, and just about the general struggle that so many here go through. It made me realize too that all of our fears, of not finding someone to accept us, of being attractive or passing, of being treated with respect, are hardly just trans issues. But yeah. We just talked (and talked, and talked). Even a bit about guys (in the abstract for my part for now

).
It kills me so much that such a wonderful person can't see how wonderful she truly is and how much she has to offer the world. (And that goes for a lot of you here too! You know who you are!) I'm truly proud to call her my sister, and grateful to have her in my life, and her be accepting of me. I would give anything for her to be happy, and I hope that getting out of here and being in a college setting this Fall will help her see the world beyond both this island and high school. (Though I also worry that because Freshmen aren't quite yet far enough removed from the HS/teen mentality, she will be alone but also isolated depending on which school she chooses to go to. One of her top choices is in Atlanta, which would be a massive relief to me if she choose to go there since I plan to head up there myself. She'd be out on her own, but in the case of an emergency she would have a safety net nearby with both me and my younger brother. Plus I just like being near her for my own sake.

)
I also had another realization... Even though we've spoken like this many times, even before I recognized myself... this wasn't a little sister - big brother conversation. This was a little sister - big sister conversation.