How My Sister Taught Me About the Magic of Family

By CL Bledsoe — NOT ANOTHER TV DAD

Here’s something I’ve noticed: decent people tend to think they’re terrible people. Terrible people, on the other hand, tend to think they’re decent. I read an article a while back about weight loss that said that, to keep weight off once it’s been lost, a person has to basically become obsessed with what they eat. I think being a decent person is like that; you have to be obsessed with your own actions. It’s not a switch you can flick; you have to actively strive to be a good person all the time.

My sister is a decent person, but she often thinks she’s not. She’s actually a very good person. I think a lot of her self-doubt comes from how we were raised. The nicest way I can put it is to say that we were both taught to have overactive work ethics, so that we are never satisfied with the work we’ve done. We’re full of self-doubt and never accept our actions or intentions as being our best. That means we both constantly strive to do better and be better.

My sister has always been decent, though. Even in our earlier life, there are shared experiences that she looks back on and regrets, whereas I can see that they were often positive formative experiences for me, ones that made me feel loved and seen, when I wasn’t getting that from anywhere else. My sister is the kind of person…