My sister is a few weeks away from finishing her PhD – this is a massive achievement and I’m very proud of her. We’ve always been very close to each other, however she is now beginning to apply for early career researcher roles at various universities, which is raising some very strong and unexpected feelings for me.
Reflecting on these feelings, I finished a PhD around five years ago and went straight into a non-academic job that I do not like. I’m the oldest child in my family and I felt a lot of pressure – from my mother in particular – to stay in the same town with a regular income in order to support my younger siblings going through uni.
I realise I have grief from around that period in my life. I didn’t feel that I had the same freedom to explore opportunities the way my sister does now. What compounds this is how much I have disliked the job I went into. It pays well and I have generous holidays, however it has taken a toll on my mental and now physical health – I’m currently not working due to a major illness. So how do I hold those two things: my grief at missed opportunities and my continued support of my sister? How can I acknowledge and process my feelings while also not impacting my relationship with my sister?
Eleanor says: One of the irritating things about sacrifices: the fact that they were sacrifices can fade over time. You’d expect the opposite. You’d expect that the greater the sacrifice, the more it would stay alive in memory. But weirdly, the opposite can happen: as time goes by, it fades into the wallpaper of other people’s lives, and they expect it to fade in yours.
It’s easy for others to lapse into thinking we no longer recall or mind that dreams were deferred, or futures foreclosed. It sounds to me a little like you were expected to make quite big sacrifices for others – but that others may not realise they still feel like sacrifices to you. No wonder some feelings of resentment are stirring!
You asked how you could process these feelings without impacting your relationship with your sister.
The first thing is to beware of “grass is always greener” thinking. Yes, your sister pursued her PhD into academia, but as you’ll know from your own doctorate, academia isn’t always a beautiful pasture. She may well turn out to face precarity, drudgery and internal politics in the coming years. The fact that she had the freedom to pursue academia doesn’t necessarily mean that day-for-day she’ll be having a better time than you. A surefire way to poison a relationship is to assume only one of you knows suffering, while the other is silver-spooned.
Second, I wonder whether it might help to process the source of these feelings. We’re usually pretty good at feeling resentful around someone who has what we want, instead of resenting whatever it is that stopped us from getting it. It doesn’t sound like your sister was instrumental in pressuring you to make this choice; she was a benefactor of that choice, maybe, but not its architect. So perhaps it might help to think of these feelings as stirred by her, but not really about her.
Relatedly, I wonder whether you might feel some anger about this, as well as the grief you mentioned. You write that your mother was the source of a lot of pressure; that she was part of why you felt shackled to obligations, and like you had no other choice.
It’s natural to grieve for lost futures in just the way you describe, but might you also have some anger towards your mother? If so, sometimes uncorking anger can really help. Even just allowing yourself to feel mad in private might turn some of that grief into rage. In the wake of tragedy, anger can at least restore a sense of agency, whereas grief makes us feel passive.
Finally, it might help to reflect on the ways in which your story isn’t over. The fact that you once put others first in this major way doesn’t mean you have to keep doing so for ever. The fact that your sister is now at this major crossroads could be an opportunity to make one of your own.
Do you want to stay in this job? What would you do now, if you were only making the decision through your own eyes?
The fact that you were dealt this blow in the past doesn’t condemn you to keep accepting it. You can insist on recognising your sacrifice as a sacrifice, or even insist on changing it as much as is possible now.
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