It wasn’t always like this. Growing up, I was the designated “family disappointment in training.”

Marcus was the golden child—varsity athlete, student government president, early acceptance to Princeton. He was the sun around which our family orbited. Jenna was the social butterfly who married a dermatologist straight out of college and joined the country club, fulfilling the suburban destiny my mother had scripted for her.

And then there was me. The quiet one. The quirky one. The one who spent weekends reverse-engineering code in her bedroom instead of going to parties.

“Sarah needs to work on her social skills,” I’d overheard my mother whisper to her bridge group when I was sixteen. “She’s very… internal.”

My father was more direct. “Your brother is going to run a Fortune 500 company someday. You need to think about realistic goals, Sarah.”

When I got into MIT, there was no celebration dinner. Marcus had just made the partner track at his consulting firm, and that was the real news. My acceptance letter sat on the kitchen counter for three days, gathering dust, before Mom finally moved it to file it away in a drawer labeled “Miscellaneous.”

“Computer science,” Dad had said, scanning the brochure with a frown. “Well, I suppose someone has to do the tech support.”