Envy is a double-edged razor

I am a deeply jealous person.

I realized this when my mom told me a story of how I reacted when she was pregnant with my younger brother. When I found that out, I began drawing violent stuff in my notebook with black crayons, beheadings, and the like. It was not just early onset “emo” behavior; it was something more than plain jealousy. It was the beginning of years’ worth of resentment and reality checks.

What isn’t there to be jealous of?

He is a man, above all, and it meant that the patriarchal society we have would always favor his gender. Besides the less critical discrimination of his physical features, they brushed off his tendencies for rage as typical expressions of manhood. I, on the other hand, could not dare to express an “unwarranted” emotion, or they would punish me.

To clarify, I did not hate him. He is my brother despite all these. Growing up, we were always civil, and sometimes childhood innocence meant we were best friends. However, there was always an unspoken tension between us, a mostly one-sided competition of who gets to be the “best” child. During the darkest of times, I thought I was looking at my enemy from the other side of the window, not knowing I was looking at a mirror.

All hell broke loose in me when one night, he forgot to close the door to our rooftop during a rainstorm when I asked him to, while I was immensely agitated studying for an exam.

Everything near the rooftop door was wet. My mother’s anger was not toward my brother. Instead, it was for the ingrate I was after being blamed for a mistake I didn’t commit.

I knew, then, that it wasn’t going to be a fair fight. I was supposed to close the door because it was a “homemaking task,” and my grandmother instilled in this family outdated ideas on what males and females should know to do. My mom was mad for the right reasons, and I was, too. However, I knew better than to cause a scene.

On the same night of the rainstorm, thunder grumbling, I used a blade’s serrated surface on my brother. The sharp edges drew near his soft, sweet skin, and I enacted my revenge.

I shaved my brother’s eyebrows off.

I woke up the next day with the satisfaction of my brother’s frantic footsteps running back and forth in front of the mirror. I never confessed to it, and until this day, it is still up for discussion.

Without proper evidence, I was still the good, submissive child they taught me to be. Good is relative, anyway. I was a good person who did something “bad.”

I do not regret my actions. Nonetheless, as much as I wanted to “hurt” my brother at that time, I now realize how it also hurt me in the process. Yes, I championed the ideals that feminists fought for throughout history but only for momentary fulfillment. Ideology aside, I still made someone’s life miserable, and the guilt wounded my relationship with my brother for a long while.

Looking back, my relationship with my female-dominant family also complicated the situation more. I must not solely blame them for their internalized misogyny since they, unlike me, grew up in a male-dominant clan.

It took years for me to realize that breaking generational trauma by addressing family relationships is more intricate than I thought. Thus, maturity and compassion compel me to forgive the sad reality we must learn to accept. We cannot hate people into understanding and giving love to others. Even with that, we cannot change the world alone and all at once.

Changing myself is a good start, though. Now, though fights between my brother and I are inevitable, the fragility of our relationship is strengthened by my responsibility, as his sister, to teach him how to be a better person—a better man. He is older now. If that is the only change I can pass on to others in this lifetime, then that is still one less bigoted person in the world.

It is my sisterly duty to love and teach him to love, though I recognize that there will always be aspects left misunderstood. He will always be my brother, but deep down, I know he will always be a man.

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Alyssa Adul, 18, is a small but terrible college student from Ateneo de Manila University, who believes that anything is possible with a little faith, trust, and a heaping cup of caffeine.