Being patient

My house is pretty big, it has a lot of rooms. There are four people living in the house: my father, my mother, my sister and I. I have my own room and my sister does too. Me and her are 3 and a half years apart from each other. My sister is 14, almost 15, and I’m 18. She has her own room but she loves to come into my room to annoy me and I really believe that she does do annoying things to get on my nerves. At least it feels to me like she does things just to annoy me and try to get me upset on purpose.

Sometimes her attitude and behaviors really do get on my nerves. Actually, most of the time they do. There are times that she doesn’t get on my nerves which is good because I really like my sister and we do have some fun times together. If I am honest with myself, I admit that I probably do some things that may annoy her too because that’s what sisters do, right? But there is one time that I didn’t let her bother me: I was patient

One night, on a weekend after I got home from working a very busy shift at Dunkin in Lewiston, I went into my room to watch a Christmas movie and I had snacks while I watched the movie. I just needed to zone out and relax. The movie was one of my favorites that I really enjoyed watching because it has a good story and a happy ending.

 And then my sister came into my room at a really important point in the movie. She burst into my room without knocking and she said she wanted to play video games on her phone with me because she was bored. I said “ I’m watching a movie, I don’t want to play a game with you right now”. After I said that she started to get really mad. So she started being loud and doing things like messing around with my stuff and moving things around. 

I could not believe that she was touching my things and she was not respecting me wanting to watch the movie privately. I told her to stop and also she was being rude and saying mean things and doing mean things. She just kept up with her annoying behaviors and then she started to repeat everything that I was saying in a sassy voice. I told her to stop please and asked her nicely to leave my room. When she didn’t stop, then I took a deep breath, made eye contact, and sat on my bed patiently waiting for her to leave my room. She was so surprised that she said “fine, be like that”, and left the room. I was actually quite shocked that my patience worked and I was also happy with myself that she actually left my room and that I could go back to relaxing and watching my movie, hoping that my sister wouldn’t bother me for a while, at least. I decided, then and there, that I should probably try patience in dealing with my younger sister more often.

“Being patient in the inpatient world” by RomanK Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0