A reflection on how I’ve been calling someone I met in 5th grade, my sister. Let’s explore chosen family, loyalty, and why sisterhood doesn’t need a bloodline.
My mother smuggled me (she did pay for my ticket but still, for creative impact, IYKWIM) into that seniors’ picnic, ankle wrapped in pain and pride. I was in fifth grade, hobbling along, trying to be invisible, burning with the embarrassment of limping through a sea of older faces. My mind flickered between “please don’t pull me out” and “what am I doing here?” Then she appeared — older, confident, territorial over the space next to her. My mother, for reasons of mercy or matchmaking, basically planted me beside her. A senior girl with sharp eyes and soft hands. She asked what happened to my foot. She smiled when I winced. She told me to rest it. She shared her water bottle.
In that moment, though I did not know it yet, she was the first woman in my life who might hold me, not by right, but by choice.
I do not remember the specifics of our first conversation, but I remember the feeling. I remember the quiet awe of being seen by someone older, someone who had no reason to care but did anyway. I remember thinking, “why is she talking to me? does she think I’m cool? can I be her friend?” and somehow all of it being true at once.
When I think about that day now, it feels like a prophecy written in chalk. My mother did not know it then, but when she sat me next to that senior girl at a school picnic, she handed me my first sister.
I cannot tell you exactly when my brain decided to stop seeing her as “that senior” and start seeing her as someone I might love fiercely. I might say it was in the way she would call me “kiddo” just to irritate me, but only when she meant it. I might say it was when she threatened me with motherly scoldings. Or when she messaged me just to ask if I ate. But honestly, it was slow. It was quiet. It was a thousand unremarkable moments strung together until one day the string held a tapestry.
She became my sister while no one was watching.
In those first years, we spoke rarely. In school corridors, our interactions were polite nods, excited but shy “hi’s,” brief exchanges about trivial things. But always there was that undercurrent; a familiarity that neither of us yet named. I would glance across classrooms and see her silhouette. I would catch her in a memory years later, asking “did you know?” as if she knew I was watching the same sky. We didn’t need to fill all the silence. The silences filled themselves around us.
As time passed, she would turn up in my life more often. Unexpectedly. An Instagram message at 2 a.m. when I was crying over something small and stupid. A meme just because. A scolding text when I did something reckless. A call to ask if I’m okay even when I say I’m fine. The person who would comfort me through heartbreak and threaten anyone who caused it. She never sugar-coated. She just showed up, blunt and honest and good.
These gestures (tiny on their own) arranged themselves into constellations. I looked up one night and realised I had been navigating by them. I realised that her presence became gravitational: I orbited around her kindness, her fierce loyalty.
It wasn’t some cosmic explosion. It was accumulation. Like one fine day, you look up and realise the stars have drawn a constellation you can finally name. And that’s what happened. Somewhere between being her “kiddo” and her “Missy,” between her fierce protectiveness and her endless patience, she became everything to me.
I never pinpointed a moment of transition. I cannot hold it in my mind. It was not her handing me a crown or me handing her my heart. It was something more quiet. Something like surrender.
And so one day, I stopped calling her “a friend.” I began to explain, when people asked, that she is my sister. Not by blood but by everything else that matters.
She is warmth and warning label in one body.
Describing her feels impossible because she exists at the intersection of extremes. She is gentle and brutal, light and armour. She is the soft place I land and the force that pushes me back up. She will call you “bub” while roasting you into emotional maturity.
In a world where kindness is often mistaken for weakness, she reminds me that nurturing is a form of strength. That mothering isn’t about age or titles but about intention. She mothers everyone she loves, and yet, she will not let anyone take her for granted.
There is something revolutionary about her kind of care. The way she gives it freely but demands accountability. The way she listens without judgement and still manages to call you out. She is the kind of person who will celebrate your smallest victories and still tell you to drink water and get your life together.
Every sisterhood needs this balance: one to be the flame, one to hold the matchbox. She is both.
She is the friend who will threaten to fight your ex, the mentor who will proofread your existential crises, and the sister who will tell you to love yourself like she already does. Her presence is an ecosystem: chaotic, grounding, and necessary.
Chosen family is rebellion and sanctuary at once.
There’s something defiant about chosen family. About saying, “I choose you,” in a world that tells you family is something you’re born into. She taught me that loyalty can exist without legal titles. That love can be thicker than blood. That you can build a home out of people who were never supposed to be yours on paper.
Chosen family is the rebellion of the lonely and the sanctuary of the misunderstood. It’s the warm middle ground between solitude and belonging. With her, I learned that you don’t always need shared DNA to feel seen. Sometimes, you just need someone who looks at you and sees your whole soul, whether it’s messy, dramatic, unfiltered, and loves it anyway.
I think back to every version of myself that has existed since that picnic. The anxious fifth grader. The heartbroken teenager. The tired university girl juggling a dozen things at once. She has loved them all. She has loved me when I couldn’t even stand myself.
She is proof that no amount of family is too much family. That there is always room for one more chair at the table, one more heartbeat to call your own.
On her birthday, i remember what she taught me.
It’s her birthday today!!! Another orbit around the sun for the woman who became my constant. I scroll through old chats and laugh at how we’ve evolved: from sticker wars and chaotic confessions to sharing the kind of silence only real sisters understand.
Every year, I try to find new words to describe what she means to me, but language always feels small. So instead, I return to this truth: she raised parts of me my parents never met. She made me braver, funnier, softer. She made me want to be someone’s safe place too.
If sisterhood is a language, ours is written in inside jokes, gentle scoldings, and late-night advice that feels like therapy and stand-up comedy at once. She is the Meredith to my Cristina, my person, my proof that souls find each other when they’re meant to.
And today, I hope she feels everything she has given me: love, belonging, laughter, healing; reflected right back at her.
Thank you for everything, arasshu.
There is a strange comfort in knowing that you can build family from scratch. That you can find sisters in strangers. That sometimes, life gifts you a bond that outlives distance, time, and logic.
When I think of her, I don’t see the years between us or the circumstances that brought us together. I just see the light she carries, the way she anchors me without trying.
Blood makes you related, but love makes you family. And if my heart had a family tree, her name would be written in permanent ink.
Want more messy nostalgia, found-family feels, and diary-entry-level devotion? Slide into Her Campus at MUJ, where we romanticise friendships like Greek epics and cry over texts that end with “ily, idiot.” And if you’re wondering who decided to make sisterhood sound like a revolution disguised as a hug; yeah, it’s me, Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, professionally sentimental and proudly so. 💌