Identical by Name, Different by Nature

This is a short essay I had to write for my English class. I had to pick something to define, so I decided it would be cool to define what it is to be a twin. This essay is due on Monday, so please rip it up to pieces and let me know what I could improve or change. And if you get to the end and you're confused, it's because I haven't finished it yet; I'm still trying to figure out how to end it. Oh and if you guys have better ideas for a title, I would love to hear them.

Identical by Name, Different by Nature

Oftentimes I am asked what it’s like being a twin, and after so many years of being asked the same question over and over again my mind has been wired to automatically answer with a gentle smile and a simple sentence: “It’s fun!” Although I answer with full honesty, my response barely passes as an appropriate answer, hardly doing the question any justice. It doesn’t even begin to scrape the surface and gives no real description of what the life of a twin is like. The word fun can be used to describe a wide range of activities, always subject to personal opinion. My answer truly means nothing. Yet it always seems to satisfy them, almost as if my answer had been expected, as if being a twin could be nothing else. But why would they have reason to think otherwise when all they can picture are the exciting tricks we can play on the adults or perhaps even the magical mental connection we are so commonly rumored to have? Hardly does anyone stop and think about the negatives that come with being a twin, like the harsh reality that we can never truly escape the comparisons made to our counterpart. We are robbed of any individuality. It’s a burden we are forced to carry from the moment we are born. It’s the price that we must pay for the endless blessings that come from twindom.

Despite the growing desire to call out their ignorance, their inability to comprehend that being a twin isn’t always what it’s made to seem, I have never been able to bring myself to blame them for making that mistake knowing that I too would do the same had I not been born a twin. I acknowledge the difficulty of trying to comprehend something without any real experience in the area; I have never been able to wrap my head around not being a twin. Nevertheless, I continue to be disturbed by the notion that the world has an incomplete idea of the life of a twin, fed by the myths it creates when trying to uncover the mysteries of twindom. So I blame the world. Not its curiosity. It’s curiosity actually satisfies me, brings joy to my heart knowing that people are astonished and amazed when they wonder what it’s like being a twin. No, it’s the need to create the stereotypes that truly bothers me. The world has produced different ideas about the relationship between twins; they believe that one must be better than the other, that we are polar opposites. In movies and television shows, there is always a twin that is smart while the other is athletic. Or one is good and the other evil. These stereotypes always come up immediately after someone realizes that we’re twins. Someone will always ask who the smarter twin is, who the stronger one is, who the more attractive one is. And I have learned to deal with these questions. But dealing with is different than accepting. I have never approved of these questions, just as most people disapprove of my answer when I respond, “I don’t know.”

Thankfully my parents understood this early on in our childhood, and they have made the greatest efforts of avoiding any comparison whatsoever. Even the rest of the family in Mexico did their best of encouraging us to be ourselves, no matter what the other did. If one grew taller by a few inches, they would remind us that we still have years to grow and that we would eventually catch up. Sitting us down at the kitchen table once every few months to discuss our progress in school, in church, or in sports, our parents would first remind us that we each have our own strengths and weaknesses before going on to say that we are both doing very well despite the performance of the other. I appreciated this non-comparison rule my parents abided by, and it taught me humility and the importance of encouragement. Instead of boasting about my academic performance, I learned to help my brother when he needed help and to ask for it when I needed it, never making the mistake of implying a certain superiority.

Being a twin isn’t special to me. At least not the way others make it to be. There’s nothing special that comes with being one, and no one gives any special attention to them. My brother is just my brother. He’s not my other half. I’m not saying that I don’t love him because I have more love for him than most people could hope to love another person. All I am saying is that he does not make me me. Too many times have I had my brother’s actions reflect upon me, as if him doing something is the equivalent as if I had done it. And vice versa. I could never blame anyone for confusing the two of us, or even more extreme thinking that we’re one person - it has happened various times - but I absolutely despise people’s natural tendency to fuse the two of us together: my personality is different from his, I have different values than him, and we have different dreams. They may be similar, but they’re still different. It’s a challenge that I must deal with constantly, and although the actual action never literally kills me, it kills the idea of me.

Biologically speaking, a twin is one of two children born at the same birth, typically only separated by a matter of moments, although this period can extend up to a day. In my case, I am only a minute older than my brother. Sixty seconds. That’s what separated my brother and me. Those sixty seconds produced the life of two different entities, two different people, each special in his own way. We are identical twins, one form of twin pairs, coming from the same zygote and from there developing into two separate embryos. Because identical twins come from the same egg, we have the same DNA - no, we don't have the same fingerprints in case you were wondering - and we have developed many of the same physical traits, to some growing up to look like clones of one another. Even dressing similarly starting at a young age, we have been literal physical reflections of one another. Our physical resemblance has become the prime identification of our twindom.

Because twin siblings have more in common than any other pair of random people yet are separate people with distinct personalities, mythology, especially that of African and Native-American tribes, emphasize the partnership of twin siblings. They clearly demonstrated the companionship they klbelieved twins to have, a force stronger than the average friendship or brotherhood. However, many of these civilizations and their mythologies demonstrate that they all had differing opinions on the personalities of twins: some believed twins to be exact duplicates of each other while others believed them to be polar opposites. More often than not the twins in these mythologies are enemies, rivals, or are complementary symbols. One might be a male and the other female or one representing the sun while the other represents the moon or one is good and the other evil.

An example of twins in mythology are the Greek brothers Castor and Polydeuces, a pair of twins where one was born an immortal while the other was forced to live a mortal life. Despite this difference, the two brothers grew up together forming a natural bond of friendship; this bond that they had played a big role when Castor, the mortal brother, died. Polydeuces, unable to live without his brother, forfeits his mortality in favor of a half-immortality that he is now forced to share with his brother. The two were allowed to live forever as long as they agreed to travel between Olympus and the Underworld periodically, but it was a sacrifice they were willing to make for their sibling.

This is what defines twindom for me. I think of twindom to mean the unbreakable bond two brothers have. Of course the two siblings have to be born at the same time, but there are many times that twins can be separated by days. I personally knew a pair of twins that were born 23 days apart! They were so different from one another. One was skinny, short, and blonde while the other was much taller, athletically built, and with very dark hair. They didn’t look like twins. But they were still close, sitting at the same lunch table, sharing the same friends, and looking out for one another. Their differences didn’t split them apart. It’s the love and friendship the two shared that can be seen in all pairs of twins, even when they try to deny it and go their separate paths. We can’t read each other’s minds and we can’t feel our sibling’s pain, but we have an undeniable bond that only grows stronger as time goes by.