When Your Idol Lets You Down

Dear Dee:
I have two sisters, and I absolutely adore both of them.
My favorite of the two graduated college in 3 years and is getting educated in law. My other sister lives in Cleveland and is working there as a teacher, which she graduated in high honors.

I copied my screen name after hers, I am moving in to her old room, I have a ton of her old clothes and I have visited her in college many times. I found a diary of hers under her bed, and I read it through out of curiosity. She wrote that she had sex when she was 14, was doing drugs like cocaine, E, etc., not much later, drank Captain Morgan quite a bit before she was 21, and many other appalling things.

I love her very much, but I am wondering why she did all those terrible things, and I even find myself wondering why I like her so much.

So you found out your sister has a past. It happens. It doesn't change how she feels about you or the person she is now. She's still the same. What you had done was put her on this perfect pedestal where you'd imagined she'd done no wrong, played by all the rules and never ever did anything stupid.

Well, sorry. She did. She did lots of stupid things. And fact of the matter is if you asked her, she's probably sorry about it. So where do you go from here?

You learn from her mistakes. You don't repeat any of them and you continue to look up to your sister as a person whom you admire and aspire to be like because you've learned from her mistakes, grown from watching her and aspired to be as cool as she is.

It's just that simple! Don't burn your sister at the stake for her past mistakes. Focus on the great person she is now and what she's trying to accomplish in her life. And remember you don't have to take the same painful road she did ... you can bypass it, thanks to lessons learned from her experiences and make your own success story.

By the way, you might wanna talk to your sister about all of this, but I am not quite sure if it's OK to tell her you read her diary ... only you know how she'd take that ;-).