What it's like being a Twin

Megan Roth grew up as a fraternal twin, and being a twin has had a significant impact on her personal identity. She and her twin sister often got confused for each other, but they also had unique personalities. They shared everything, but also valued having their own things. As they grew older, they started to develop their own interests and drifted apart. Megan felt a constant comparison to her twin, which affected her self-esteem. Despite their differences, they still shared a close bond and supported each other. Megan acknowledges the challenges of being a twin but also recognizes the special connection and shared experiences that come with it. Hello, my name is Megan Roth, and I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in your very conventional suburban household. I have three siblings, an older sister, and a little brother, along with a twin. Only 3.2% of the world population is a twin. I have a fraternal twin sister named Kayla, who is older than me just by three minutes. While being a twin is somewhat like a normal sibling, there are certain experiences only twins may relate to. In this, I'm going to talk about the different ways in which being a twin has affected my personal identity and my current adult life. In the world of twins, you have your identical and your fraternal twins, which can be girl-girl, boy-boy, or girl and boy. While identical twins are, well, identical, I am fraternal, but still grew up with people confusing me and my twin sister for each other. This started in our preschool classes and has continued so on in our life. When me and my twin sister were brought home, my older sister couldn't even comprehend that there were two of us, and so gave us a singular identity of Makayla. While this was sometimes funny and gave me and Kayla the self-confidence to try to trick people that we were each other, it also had some interesting effects. From a young age, we began feeling like we needed to find our own personal identities separate from each other. While maybe we got confused for each other in preschool, there was no getting us confused while we were at home. People view twins almost as partners in crime, but in our case, Kayla was more so the accessory to my crimes. Kayla was very level-headed in her own words, afraid of getting in trouble. I, on the other hand, am slightly more free-spirited and didn't mind the consequences to an extent. The first major point of this was when we were about three years old. We snuck into my older sister's room, who was four at the time, and took one of her favorite toys, an aerial flip phone. Either we agreed, or I'd convince Kayla, which is more likely, that aerial belonged in water. This led us, well, me, putting the phone into our sister's fish tank and ultimately breaking the toy. Tears upon tears later that night from our older sister and a conversation with our parents led to the now household-famous words of Kayla, being asked why she did it, and her reply being, she didn't want to get in trouble. And then my response in return was that I didn't care if I got in trouble. While we were clearly different people personality-wise, being a twin does come with one thing, having to share a lot of everything. We shared our bedrooms, sports, interests, friends, birthday parties, and many other things. Some of these things came with perks. Birthday parties meant double the presents, and since we shared friends, then we would all have one giant birthday party together. Sharing a bedroom was also fun to a point. When it came to decorating a room, there was a whole excursion of arguments, especially what color to paint our room. This led our childhood bedroom being three different colors, a teal blue for Kayla, a light purple for me, and a weird sandy yellow color that we somehow agreed upon. Choosing the color to paint our room took a lot, a lot of time. So we kind of gave up on trying to compromise on what to put on the walls, leaving them vacant for the majority of our childhood. Sharing practically everything in our lives made it that much more important when we had our own things. One of the things that me and Kayla fought over for a large portion of our lives was using each other's mirrors. We shared a closet, each with their own sides of it, and each had a full-body mirror hanging off of the door. The door that was on my side of the closet went straight into a wall, not letting me open it all the way, while Kayla didn't have this issue. I would sometimes use her mirror just because I could open it all the way. Whenever she saw me doing this, she got in a little hissy fit. I didn't really care much. It was a stupid argument. There was even one day in which I took a picture in her mirror and had posted it. I then get an angry text from Kayla. Well, now that I'm talking about the situation, I realize how stupid it was. I think it just showed how important ownership of our own little things in our lives was that much more important to us, because, well, I mean, we had shared everything, from the womb, to our room, to anything else imaginable. Starting in middle school and so on until high school, me and Kayla started drifting apart more than finding our own identities. I played soccer, Kayla swam. I liked life sciences, Kayla liked computer science. I took IB courses, Kayla took AP courses. I liked to paint, Kayla preferred to read. I played the flute, and Kayla played the French horn. While we created differences in ourselves, a long-standing shadow still hung over us. From a young age, we were compared by teachers, peers, and even in our own minds. Growing up, I felt Kayla was always smarter than me. She was the smarter twin. She took advanced English classes in fourth grade, and I had to be pulled out of the hallway to work on my reading, pace, and understanding. While any kid put in that position might feel bad about themselves, I particularly did. I was raised the same as Kayla. People used to even think we were the same person and confuse us. How is it that I was the stupid twin? While it's a little harsh, those were the thoughts running through my head as a little fourth grader. There was always this little competition with each other in our heads, whether we liked it or not. This was something that was just built into us starting at a really young age of about three years old, when people compared us for the same person. Even our peers growing up would make comments about each other, like, oh, Kayla's a smart twin, you're the pretty twin, or something of that sort. This did have some positive aspects, as we didn't like being compared, so this drove us to find things that we enjoyed separate from each other, and we helped push each other in those areas without having too much competition. I also think that there's this idea of twins that they're supposed to be best friends. They're supposed to always want to be around each other, and that continues all the way through old age. Sometimes people are confused by me and my twin arts, super close. Growing up, we each had our own struggles, but Kayla's always felt bigger than mine, so I didn't really bring mine up. Kayla did struggle with a lot of mental health issues that kids at seven years old normally don't have to deal with. My parents were trying to figure out the best way to help her, but I did share a room with her. This left me somewhat vulnerable to being an emotional punching bag due to difficulty trying different meds and whatnot. I do believe that this somewhat damaged our relationship, starting at a very young age, and made me not really like being around her. But we are working on it, and I do enjoy having her as a friend and in my life always. There are some aspects of being a twin that are true, though. You will always have someone that you get to share every life experience with. From birthdays, to graduations, to every year of college, I have someone that I know I can always talk to who is going through similar things when I feel alone. Growing up in the same bedroom might have been hard and had its negative aspects, but also it was kind of like a slumber party some nights, and we'd just stay up talking until we could fall asleep. I learned a lot of valuable things in life, like how it is to live with someone and sharing a space with someone else, which has helped me throughout my college life. I would never give up the fact that I am a twin and had her a roommate my whole life, but this is just a personal reflection into how that has shaped me, and I wanted to share with the world what it really is like sometimes being a twin, and to also give other twins something to relate to. Thank you so much for listening.