I'm the oldest of 5 - we're all within an 8-year age range. My two sisters and I were homeschooled until I was about 11, when we moved and all started going to a proper school, so I spent a lot of my childhood with them. Right now my sisters and I are not exactly close, and never were - we have very different personalities (serious, quiet, nerdy; "feminine", social, tempestuous; kind, sensitive, emotional) and the middle sister especially has had a lot of issues to deal throughout her entire life, which ended up bleeding over into the lives of my other younger sister and myself. Being related hasn't made us closer, in fact I think it's made our relationships more difficult, but they are special to me.

My brothers are the two youngest and were never homeschooled (too young), so I didn't spend as much time "growing up" with them. The older brother is the sibling most similar in personality to me, and he and the younger sister both share a lot of nerdy interests, so we're close (I also think he's gone full gaytheist, like me, but haven't gotten to talk about that with him yet...which is a whole other kettle of fish). My younger brother is farthest from me in age and I feel very distant from him, which is too bad since he seems like a sweet guy, and I'm going to try to spend more one-on-one time with him this summer.

I'm only in college and none of my siblings are out of high school (a few of them will be soon though), so our relationships aren't fully developed or set-in-stone and I don't quite have that perspective of decades-long relationships yet. Still, most of us have healthy relationships with each other or else are moving towards that point. I've enjoyed growing up in a big family - it gave me a lot of perspective on interacting with different personalities. Having a ton of siblings didn't give me insta-friends, exactly, but I'm still glad they're a part of my life even if it gets crazy sometimes.