My brother lined me that he cooked Kaipalo (hard boiled egg soup with Chinese herbs&spices). I got upset because we had just went to Costco and had a super packed fridge full of cooked food, crab, rotisserie chicken and leftover Thai food that he had made. I didn’t understand why he had to make more when we already had so much food.  Why wouldn’t he finish the old food first? Didn’t he know the the crab should be eaten first otherwise it will go bad? Didn’t he know I spent so much time cleaning and organizing the fridge? Now that he had cooked, what we’re going to do with the old food and where we’re we going to store the new ? 

Since my mom and my brother came to visit me, I have had no time for myself. I haven’t gotten much sleep. The bank made a mistake with my car loan. My work is extremely busy. It’s the wedding season and it’s the busiest time of the year (I’m a wedding gown designer). I’ve been busy putting out fires at work every single day. Brides crying. Brides gaining weight. Dresses no longer fitting. Who has to deal with them?  It’s me.  I have to finish sketching the new collection; that’s the most important part of my job that happens only once a year. I would rather spend time sketching than cleaning the fridge.  I have too much to handle right now. I’m stressed to the max. Didn’t he know….? Why would he cook and give me more work to deal with? Why why why?

As I wrote all this down, I was fuming. The emotion stirred back up. I went back and read my own thoughts. Then I realized, all of this is in my head and mine alone. How could I assume he would know all this? He doesn’t go to work with me. Not even my co-worker, who goes through the same thing, understands me completely. How could I expect my brother, a guy, to understand the stress level of a women’s clothing business. Let alone understand me as a women who need to obsessively organize the fridge when living with so many people.  Some of my girlfriends wouldn’t even understand me. As his sister, I don’t completely understand his stress about his own finances. How could I expect that because he’s my brother, he would understand me?

My mom and my brother are just visiting from Thailand and staying with me for a short time. Its my fault that I wanted to buy a lot of crab to impress my brother and my mom, to show them that the crab here is so much bigger than in Thailand? It was me who thought it’s not enough to just buy 1 tray of crab? It was me who told my mom and my brother to go ahead buy whatever at Costco and they ended up doing exactly that. How could it be their fault, but not mine, that I allowed them to do all that buying knowing full well my fridge was too small to handle all that stuff. How could I expect them to want to eat what I want them to eat while sometime I don’t even want to eat what they cook? Why did I expect him to know what I think is the right thing to do while I have so much evidence that we have different opinions about many things?  Is it right for me to take it all out on my brother? Could I have told him nicely rather than the way I did?  Would changing the way I acted have made the situation better? 

After I asked all these questions I realized that it was me who started the whole ordeal, set up condition after condition, expected others to do what I thought was right. No one knew what I thought and what I went through. The stressful situation I’m in has nothing to do with my brother’s actions. In my mind, I thought my brother failed to meet my expectation, but in reality I’m the one who set up conditions that are so hard to achieve. I basically expected him to know what I think. It’s like I expect to win a lotto every time I play. That’s impossible.

By asking the right questions to myself, instead of looking outward as I originally had done, I realized it was my fault and not my brother’s that created the suffering in my head. I can now really look at him and talk to him again. I’m glad I caught up with my biased mind otherwise, with a week left before he returns to Thailand, I would have been miserable,  So much misery just because I tried to defend and control my self belongings; the crab, the space in the fridge, the money I earn from this job, my “designer” identity and, above all, my brother.