I am simply a brother- nothing more, nothing less. Every day I wake up as Emily’s brother, and go to sleep as Ellen’s brother. I will forever be attached to my sisters, struggling to become free from the burden of their accomplishments.

I was Emily’s brother ever since I could hold a pencil. When I was four, I started taking art lessons with a private tutor who would come over to my house every week for an hour. After a month of easy drawing lessons, my teacher attempted to teach me how to draw a self-portrait. “It’s easy! Draw a line in the center where the nose is, and make a horizontal line where the eyes are. You just need to make the eyes nice and round” my art teacher said. Or at least that’s what I think she said because I heard, “The mass of the sun plus the number of moons in the universe is how to draw a portrait.” I felt as though she was speaking a different language. When my grueling hour of lessons were over, I was so relieved. I forgot the weird alien language my teacher spoke, and went down to my basement to relax. When I came up an hour later, I saw my sister’s self- portrait, an actual human being. My sister’s drawing had made mine look like Frankenstein’s monster. Disappointed, I walked back to the basement that very evening only to see my parents compare our drawings and remark, “I guess Emily’s brother just isn’t as artistic as Emily is.”

When I was five, I decided to follow after Ellen and start playing piano. I walked into my very first lesson, and washed my hands to make sure the piano would not get dirty. The teacher ran to go get a book on how to read treble clef and bass clef. I recited, “EGBDF and FACE” constantly in an attempt to memorize the note names. An hour later when my sister was done with her lesson, my teacher finally brought me to the piano in order to play. She started with the basics saying, “This is middle C, and that is C sharp” until she finished all the note names. Unlike my art teacher, I could understand what my piano teacher was talking about, but the hard part had yet to come. Feeling as if the lesson were moving smoothly, my piano teacher began to teach about rhythms. She said, “This quarter note is worth one beat, and the time signature is 4/4 meaning that there are four beats in a measure and the quarter note gets the beat.” The alien language had made its return with the piano. I had no idea what was going on, and like all young children, I cried. My teacher in an effort to comfort me said, “Oh no! Ellen got this in one day, but I guess with you we’ll have to move more slowly.”

I made my last attempt to escape my burden with academics. In fourth grade, I was eligible for the math Olympiad competition, the competition Ellen had won every year. I walked into the first test with confidence that this time, I would make a name for myself. The coordinator, Mrs. Silver, greeted me and said, “You’re Ellen’ brother right? I look forward to great things from you.” From that moment, I could tell things would not be different. I tried to forget that comment, and focus on the problem. I had studied so much for this one moment that I would make it count. As I read the problems, the only thought in my mind was beating Ellen. Due to that mindset, I ended up missing a problem when I started panicking. I didn’t panic about the problem, instead I panicked about not beating Ellen. As a result, I could only guess the answer, and ended up getting it wrong. With that one problem, I finished with a score of twenty-four, better than Ellen’s score of twenty-three. This was different from an art and piano class, I did better than my sisters for the very first time. I walked up to accept my trophy, only to hear Mrs. Silver exclaim, “Just what I would expect from Ellen’s brother.”

My art teacher, piano teacher, and Mrs. Silver had meant no harm when comparing me to my sisters, but the comparisons started to add up. My confidence slowly left me; everywhere I went I was never known as me. I continually walked in the shadows of my older sisters no matter what I did or how well I did. I was forever stuck in a nameless world.

Then in the winter of my seventh grade year, my family received news that my Grandpa was diagnosed with colon cancer after suffering from what was first thought to be pancreatic cancer. As a result, my family took a trip to Seoul, Korea to see my Grandpa. When meeting us for the first time in five years, my Grandpa said, “Hi Emily, Ellen, and Jason.” It was the first time I had gained recognition as myself. Just hearing the name “Jason” seemed to slowly undo all the damage from hearing “Ellen and Emily’s brother.”

I could not concentrate that whole afternoon, as the word “Jason” kept ringing inside my head. As we were getting ready to leave, my Grandpa suddenly said, “Jason, don’t live your life like me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled. Maybe my Grandpa had seen that look on my face that suggested I was lost. Maybe he had a solution to the one problem I could never solve.

“I worked as a farmer and was very poor. I could never do what I truly wanted to because I did whatever necessary in order to make a living. Do what you want Jason. Have fun and be you, because you never know when your life will end.” He replied.

The previous comments by my teachers no longer seemed to matter. Just as their words had impacted my life greatly, my Grandpa’s words changed my life forever, for the better.