The night before my medical school interview, my sister poured bleach on my only blazer, and my parents told me to stop making a scene.

get people on your side?”

I looked at her then, really looked.

She was twenty-nine years old and still seemed like a child guarding a toy box. But behind the anger was fear. Fear that without comparison, without winning, without our parents clapping for every performance, she did not know who she was.

“I don’t get people on my side,” I said. “I just stopped continue reading …