I (f30) have always been the black sheep but it's starting to hurt. How can I go back to not being bothered by it?

This is a throwaway account.

tl;dr: family prefers my cruel sister and ignore me. I'd gotten over it a long time ago, but now it's starting to hurt me.

I've always felt like the black sheep of my family. I have an older sibling, now 33, and I used to look up to her when I was a kid. But when we were teenagers, she became really cruel. Not just to me, but to everyone in her life. She was abusive to her boyfriends and friends. I don't want to go into too much detail. But one of her friends attempted suicide in highschool after she spread horrible rumors about her. She also took part in a really awful senior "prank" that almost got her expelled (the prank involved racism and vandalism). My parents never punished her for anything she did as a teen. I learned really quickly to lay low and stay out of her way.

My parents also encouraged me to hide all and any acomplishments from her because they would make her feel bad. But we celebrated everything she did. My parents didn't celebrate my highschool graduation because she had already graduated 3 years before and "of course I was going to graduate." I wasn't allowed to talk about being accepted into a really good school on a scholarship because she had been rejected by her school of choice 6 months before. I wasn't allowed to celebrate my college graduation because she hadn't graduated yet. You get the idea.

My sister just went back to college for the fourth time. She lives in student housing on the opposite side of the country. I'm glad she's still trying to get a degree, but she's still (imo) a pretty bad person and I speak to her through text maybe once a month.

I want to believe that I don't care about "competing" against my sister anymore. But my mother still has the same attitude she did when we were younger. She didn't want to hear that I had gotten a promotion. She told me not to get excited because it would probably fall through anyway. She then talked about my sister's success in school for an hour. She hates my SO and constantly talks about how "perfect" my sister's boyfriend is. Lots of stupid, little things like that that I should be used to by now, and was up until now.

But for some reason this is starting to hurt a lot. My life is going really well. My SO and I are starting a family, but we're not "allowed" to be excited about our accomplishments because it might upset my sister. How do I handle this? I don't even know what I'm looking for or asking for. Maybe insight or advice from people who've been through it?

Sorry for the long post and thanks for reading.

Submitted July 03, 2020 at 07:35PM by sad_spaghetti_noodle https://ift.tt/38rVNxY