My big brother has been kind of a moving target in my life — the embodiment of goals and ideals that, by design, I can never reach. He’s four years older and that has meant that for the last decade he has been setting a standard of achievement. Future achievement. Stuff to worry about later. There’s something of my own Peter Pan complex in that, I suppose.

He graduated from high school and joined the military partially because it was 2002 and that patriotic fervor was strong but also because he knew he wasn’t ready for college. He spent his summers working for a moving company, and he knew he didn’t want to keep doing that, but wasn’t sure what to do instead. He didn’t want to amble through college and waste money trying to figure out what he wanted.

(I wish I had managed to internalize that important life lesson…)

At the end of his four years, he had grown tired of the bureaucratic structures of the Air Force. He came home for a few months — the only time where he truly lived in our Missouri house, having enlisted about four months before we moved. He hopped on his motorcycle and drove across the country, coming to see me and sleeping on a couch in the basement of my freshman dorm building. Eventually he headed back west to California.

There’s a warped irony in that. He was the one who was always so eager to leave LA. In high school he attributed a great many problems to life in LA. He was deeply convinced that everything would be better if we had never left Chicago. I don’t share it, but I also can’t fault him for that conviction. There was a very brief spell in which I shared that belief but I went on to mirror it for my three years of high school in Missouri. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with this place and see it for what the people who love it see.

I haven’t asked Josh if he’s come to terms with LA. I suppose he was never forced to by circumstance in the same way that I have been. (It was fine enough to be a bitter teenager — emo kids were so IN in 2004! — but as a twenty-something eating that humble pie, that bitterness would be decidedly not cute.)

After living with my parents, he got a job in San Diego and lived with my aunt and uncle for a few months. He basically lived in a hallway. I think it’s sort of a hallmark of your twenties, really, to have at least one insane living setup. (More on mine another day.)

Almost immediately after starting work he started school for aerospace engineering. He’d completed a few classes during his military time and had years of very practical real-world experience with that, both in the Air Force and now in the actual workforce. The thing about 40 hour work weeks, though, is that they are somewhat prohibitive to juggling class schedules, particularly in the sciences, where course sequencing is essential. (Thank you, sociology, for giving me a list of course options about double the number required, which could be taken in almost any order and combination!)

In 2012, while I was sending off foreign grad school applications, as if my lack of answers came only from insufficient schooling, he was preparing to defer his own education by a whopping three semesters because work was sending him to Afghanistan for a year to test a helicopter he’d been working on. (There’s presumably a massive team of people involved in this project, but in my head it’s just him, sitting there all, “Hey guys, I just designed this unmanned helicopter. NBD.” Whenever he talks about his work I feel like I’m listening to something out of a scifi novel because obviously books are the only way I can make SCIENCE! make sense in my head.) In the fall of 2012, the five Sweeney kids were on four continents. (Put in that way, our odds of having our family create an international incident were much higher, yeah? Yeah. Sure.)

My brother graduated high school in 2002 and now, in 2014, he has his bachelor’s degree. I point it out in those terms because he fretted over those numbers a lot. The well-payed tour was a hard pill to swallow not just because it meant a year (back) in a war zone, but because it was more lost time on this all-important goal.

It was always so perplexing to me, though, that he could think of himself in those terms. When we were younger he was alternately my hero and tormentor, as is the way with siblings, but from about the time he decided to join the military, he’s been one of the most responsible people I know. He has no debt and basically got paid to go to school between the GI bill and his work incentives. He has a well-paying job, owns a gorgeous condo in San Diego, and has an awesome girlfriend.

He’s basically a portrait of late 20’s (VERY SOON TO BE 30!) achievement. That someone who I’ve regarded as bearer of unattainable ideals could ever have felt inadequate is mind-boggling to me.

That’s life, though, isn’t it? We all have those little insecurities. Even knowing, as I do, that my brother views himself through a lens that is almost contradictory to the way that I see him, I can’t properly internalize that and apply it to my understanding of myself.

But I do know what I see when I see him. I see one of the wittiest people I have ever met. If you spend time with my family, you’ll quickly see that we value laughter. You have to be thick-skinned to be around us, but if you have that, you’ll have fun. (The inverse is probably true too, though.) That’s owed principally to my brother. I suspect that the oldest child has a critical role in establishing the tone of sibling relationships. He made us a rowdy, playful, and fiercely loyal bunch.

Speaking of, he’s also the most loyal person I know. His loyalty isn’t freely given (except if you’re lucky like me and win it by the pure accident of birth) but is a sure thing once earned. When my little brother was detained in Cairo, we made plans to buy plane tickets for both of us to go down there. His detainment just narrowly missed that one-week mark at which my older brother would have skipped out on work to go be there for his baby brother. We had no idea what we would even do, to be honest, but my brother knew in his gut that we needed to be there — that he wouldn’t feel right otherwise.

Even not knowing what, exactly, we would do, I never doubted that we’d find something productive to do, because my brother is also fiercely determined. Setting aside the fact that his studies are completely over my head with their reliance on math and science (I proofread a couple of his papers and I was proud of myself the time I understood a full 65% of what I read) I also can’t fathom doing what he’s done. As any student knows, school has this way of being all-consuming. There is no such thing as “downtime” because every moment is colored by this awareness that you SHOULD be working on something for school. There is always something to be done for school. Doing that and also putting in 40+ hour work weeks? That’s fucking insane. That’s insane and anyone who isn’t impressed by what he’s accomplished is probably an asshole with unreasonable standards, or, like, an asshole who just doesn’t like to be happy for other people. Either way, an asshole.

I am pretty much always proud of my older brother. His accomplishments obviously have nothing to do with me but I like to brag about him being MY brother all the same. In that sense, it was a true pleasure to get to be there and be part of his kickass cheering section when he got that hard-earned degree last month. He was always one of my heroes so it was awesome to hear a stranger call his name out and acknowledge just one of the many kickass things he’s done.

I love you Joshy.