Most of us will have at least one identity crisis at some point in life. For me, however, identity crisis was encrypted in both my in my twin sister's DNA before birth. We lived our lives as a matched set. We went through the same challenges. We watched our world’s ups and downs together. And we went through all of these things observing with the same eyes, scrapbook memories of the same image, a perfect reflection of one another. Then, one day we did not want that anymore — I did not want that anymore. I wanted to change “we” to “I,” and I wanted some of what was “ours” to be “mine.” Maybe not for everything, but absolutely for some parts of myself.
I am sure this is a common experience for identical twins. We lived our lives seeing the same things, but eventually the day came where I looked in the mirror and just saw my sister. This makes sense: we do look similar because of the whole twin thing or whatever — but that showed me how other people saw us as well.
I remember wanting my classmates to know my first name, not just my last name because saying that was easier than trying to figure out which one was which. I wanted to have a voice that made people think of only me, not of us as a pair. But, no matter how much we fight the ways of the world, face value is sometimes all we get and you just have to work with it. Needless to say, I had a little bit of a hipster phase, transitioning into hopelessly devoted trying not to be a hipster (how very hipster of me), and settling on 100 percent undecided on any label that I could ever put on myself.
Ultimately, this identity crisis made me who I am now, and I strongly believe that it taught me some of the most important lessons I have ever learned. I learned to love the things I shared with my sister and love the things that I didn’t. I learned that face value is worth rethinking, and I learned that identity is not reliant on what other people see.
Without these lessons I would not have learned to be bold. I would have always stayed quite, keeping every thought and memory to myself because maybe they were not really mine. Exploring different passions provided the opportunity to live a life full of strangeness. And, without strangeness I would not have discovered my love for Godzilla movies and smell of old books.
The uniqueness of being a twin provided a perspective on the effects of outside image. Recognition is something easily taken for granted. We assume, of course, that this person is this person without ever needing to think twice because we just have to recognize their face. Identity is more that skin deep. Looking in the mirror doesn’t reveal the entirety of one’s self. And, finding self is something best done selfishly. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of an identity crisis to figure that out and there is nothing wrong with that.
