Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

I’ve talked about my dad and younger brother before, and how they’ve impacted my life, but I wanted to tackle today’s prompt from a different angle.

Can someone do something objectively bad and have a positive impact on another person?

I bring this up because of my older brother. He was the first born and likely fell into that stereotypical category of “highest expectations and pressure” that we see. He has had a lot of ups and downs in his life, most of them self-imposed, but a few of them were most definitely the result of external influences.

When our mom passed away, he had been in college and our sister was still in high school, so it fell on his shoulders to help my younger brother and I with getting to and from school, or taking us to places that we couldn’t otherwise get to by walking. Dad was busy working, and his commute would often have him home around 6:00PM or later, so we didn’t spend a lot of time with him, and my older brother would have to help with grocery shopping as well. Years later he admitted that it felt really awkward and uncomfortable for him whenever my younger brother or myself would ask him when we were going grocery shopping next, as if he had somehow assumed a parental figure role in our lives.

Now, what I talked about above isn’t the “objectively bad” thing. He was doing the best he could, and the pressure probably ate him a bit and helped cause the problems he faced later in life that played into the way I see him as having a positive impact on my life.

My dad remarried a few years later, and after work was hit and miss for consistency, he eventually landed a job in another state for an old boss of his. This is what caused our family to move to South Dakota. My older brother was already living independently, and so he stayed back, which we ended up making use of because we were having trouble selling the house we had just moved out of in Colorado. He was able to do touch up work, paint rooms, and get the house more presentable. At some point in this process, he got into trouble. Up to that point I didn’t know he had trouble with alcohol, so it came as a surprise for me, still in high school and not old enough to drink, that he could get into legal trouble like that.

Eventually, we got him back with us living in South Dakota. He had no license and no car. He had to go through AA classes and get a job, and by this point I was just starting college. So we kind of come full circle. Now, I was the one driving him places when he needed the help to get back on his feet.

So, this is where I lean into this idea of twisting the prompt. I had a front row seat to the trouble and recovery my older brother endured, and I used that as a source of influence for things I SHOULDN’T do if I want things to go well in my life. I was careful with any drinking I did, and indeed, I didn’t even drink much after the age of 25 and even less than that now. That’s how I see he had a positive impact on my life and the way I see the world.

After all of this, I began to keep an eye out for objectively bad things that people do that hurt themselves and others around them so I could use that to inform me of things not to do, no matter how much “fun” or “enjoyment” they might bring to someone in the moment.