A Tale of Two Siblings
I bet our mother didn't see this coming when we were little
My brother and I started off like most siblings—hating one another.
Well, hate is a strong word. But you know how siblings are.
I was a straight-A student. He shot snakes with a slingshot. Sometimes he shot me. I once left him alone at a Blockbuster because I was tired of his attitude.
But God help you if anyone threatened or hurt the other.
Tables Turn
During our adolescence, I stopped being a straight-A student. Sam started experimenting with drugs, and I started drinking and partying too. Our poor parents. Then I got pregnant at 17, and Sam and I both dropped out of school.
I think if you were to put your money on who would have been successful based on our earliest years, you would have been wrong.
Sam is now a successful business owner and is about to buy a house with his wife and kids. He’s living the American dream and is often asked by his friends and acquaintances for his advice. I also ask him for his advice. I ask him for relationship, parenting, and career advice.
A decade ago, we were looking more like what you might have suspected if you were to place that bet on us as children.
I was married with two kids, was in grad school, and had a good-paying job. Sam was struggling to keep his job and his kids. He was not in a good place, but he was trying. He had very, very little support. Practically none at all.
Comparatively, I’ve divorced, have way more debt than he does (student loans!), and live in a tiny studio apartment. I gripe more than I deserve to. We aren’t competitive with one another, but I can’t help but be in awe of how our fates keep turning.
I asked Sam how he does it. How does he keep such a positive attitude and keep climbing those ladders when he’s being worked to the bone? How does he not throw his hands up and say, “Fuck it! I’m OUT!” like I want to do sometimes. And my gripes seem so small next to his anyway. He’s a truck driver. He works hard, long hours, with lots of misunderstandings. I’ve seen it.
“How do you have this better-than-ever attitude all the time?”
I study positive developmental psychology. The irony of my frequent grumpiness is not lost on me.
“I lie to myself until I believe it,” he said. “Then I fake it till I make it.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to open my mind to what sounded like a delusional way to go about life. “So what lie should I be telling myself right now?”
I’d just expressed my frustrations with the PhD program and my feeling that the people who are supposed to be supporting me are making my life harder. I keep walking myself back from the edge.
“Well, you gotta figure that out for yourself.”
Ugh. Thanks, Bro.
“Okay, fine. So I’m going to tell myself to go into these meetings assuming that it’s going to go well and I’m going to be heard and my advisors are going to welcome me into their open arms with glee.”
“You’re already doing it wrong,” he said.
Obviously.
“You can’t control what other people do, right?”
I could hardly believe it, but I had to admit to needing to be reminded of this simple fact.
“So,” he continued, “you have to tell yourself that you aren’t going to give up no matter what. You’re not going to quit. You’re gonna do what you have to do to become a doctor. No one’s gonna stand in your way.”
Learning Through Experience
Our mother is moving from Colorado to Arizona and has been waiting for three days for a trailer to come take her cars. Sam and I called her together to see how things were going and to assure her we’d be ready to whoop somebody’s ass if we needed to.
Thankfully, they had finally come to a solution, and she was ready to hit the road.
While we were on the phone, Sam heard from dispatch that he has a live load he has to pick up tomorrow. He was supposed to go home tomorrow. He had plans with his wife. They were going to meet with a mortgage broker.
“Don’t they ask you first?” I said.
“Nope.”
He sent me a screenshot of the text conversation. They didn’t ask. He’d responded, “10-4.”
“I want to cry,” Sam said. And that was it. He took a deep breath and accepted that he wasn’t going home tomorrow.
“Seriously, Sam, how do you do it? I’d be texting them a tirade back…”
Then it hit me.
He has better distress tolerance than I do. I had taught teenagers distress tolerance skills as part of a DBT curriculum when I was a residential counselor. I had practiced mindfulness for years. I’m still working on this.
“Ah, I know what it is. You have better distress tolerance than I do.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you can face something that distresses you and accept it so you can move forward. You aren’t derailed by it.”
I considered how Sam has been through a lot of struggle and has kept moving forward every day anyway. I’d like to think he and I have that in common. That perseverance.
“Man, I used to have more distress tolerance…” I mused. “What happened? Oh, right. I was on medication.”
The three of us had a good laugh because what I said was true. I used to take a lot of drugs to keep me from snapping. I no longer take psychotropics. I don’t drink much and only socially. No cigarettes or weed. I could exercise more… my distress tolerance has gone down.
Keeping It Together
Before the trailers arrived to haul my mother’s cars to Arizona, I had been checking on her progress. About an hour before Sam and I had gotten on the phone with her, she’d intentionally taken a walk away from the situation. The driver, dispatch, and her husband were talking through an apparent misunderstanding about his motorcycle, and my mother was ready to rip someone’s head off.
So she walked away.
“I’m proud of you,” I’d told her.
Mom was using situation selection to help regulate her emotions. Otherwise, she would have gone off on someone, and she knew that wasn’t going to be helpful.
This has been my strategy as much as I can manage it. My brother’s stress, though, comes from pursuing his goals. Mine does too. We both opted into our stress.
While I may be the one who’s studied effective emotion regulation, my brother is still someone I look up to for managing it in his day-to-day life, which is arguably more stressful than mine.
I’d bet my money on his success these days. He doesn’t quit. Thankfully, he reminds me that I shouldn’t either.
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