Monday, June 11, 2012

DISAPPOINTED

Yup. I guess that's the word to describe how I am feeling right this moment.
How would you feel if your sister got kicked out of college?
I have funded her education since her high school years.
I attended her high school graduation ceremony last year with my head held high, proud to be the big sister of a bright and outgoing young woman who knew what she wanted in life and had ways to get it.
So finding out that she had been dismissed by her college after completing her first year and a summer course broke my heart into a million little pieces.
My sister isn't stupid. I know that. She outsmarts me and my mother all the time.
She is lazy. She doesn't give a hoot about getting an education and she certainly doesn't think about all the other young girls in the world who could only pray to have enough money to attend a decent school.
Why do we all go to school, and strive to finish university?
We all want a better future. We all want to have careers.
We want to make empowered professional choices, so that we don't beg employers to hire us, or be forced to wait tables or clean toilets, or marry a rich but evil man.
And yet my sister is oblivious to all this, despite the fact that it's all I ever talk to her about.
So now she wants to go to fashion school.
Now she wants to start anew, and has promised me that once she is enrolled again, she will never ever ever take her studies for granted.
I appreciate she has to study something she loves so her attention won't stray.
But I really hope that my sister as staying power to last four years to be able to say she has obtained a degree.
A four-year course is a four-year course, whether one is learning about numbers, plants or fabrics.
I know that I have doubts about my sister's sincerity about wanting to study so badly.
But here I am, giving her another chance, as awesome big sisters do.
It's hard, sooo hard to think that everything is going to be okay.
That my sister will shape up and learn her lesson and tread the path to a successful career eventually.
It's even harder to think that she believes or listens to me.
I just hope that the way I expressed my disappointment - all those words I carelessly hurled at her and the disgusted look on my face as a reaction to her indolence - will not taint her appetite to try again.
I am very hard on her not because I want to feel powerful, but because I want her to look up to me.
I desperately want her to find out how I experienced university life and how I managed to build a career.
But for now, I hope she freaking finds a school.

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