I really love being a twin. My sister Eugenia is my favorite person on this entire earth, and I feel truly lucky to get to be her twin. As strange as it may seem, being a twin is a fairly large part of my identity. I truly would not be who I am today without my sister. Every twin’s experience is different, but I wanted to dive into what being a twin means to me and how it has shaped me.
For a while growing up, I resented my sister simply because, by nature of being twins, we were constantly compared. I never felt like I could be my own person because everything I did was somehow connected to her. It was exhausting feeling like my actions also somehow said something about her, and like her actions somehow said something about me. We were always very close and had a lot of the same interests, so naturally we were always together. In high school we both joined the newspaper and were involved in theater. We genuinely loved spending time together so it was easy to become a pair, and for others to see us as a pair. Our extended family even calls us “las morochas” which means twins in spanish and sometimes even call us “morocha” individually as well. I also moved a lot as a kid, and she was really my only consistent friend. When you don’t really know how long you’ll be living somewhere, eventually you become closed off to making friends, especially when you already have an automatic best friend right there. Through the turbulence, she became my rock. And while I always longed for my independence, I grew to love being Eugenia’s twin because she was and always will be my favorite person on earth.
When the time to go to college rolled around, we both knew we wanted to go our separate ways. While we consciously knew we wanted college to be a time to grow into our own people outside of our relationship, we also very naturally wanted different things out of college. I knew I wanted a small liberal arts college, and that just wasn’t what she was particularly looking for. Leaving my sister was probably the hardest adjustment I’ve had to make. Leaving behind the familiar is always hard, but leaving behind a person you’ve known since before birth was a whole other level of painful. My first year of college was awful, as was hers. We both struggled individually, and so our relationship struggled as well. As we’ve both overcome issues and become stronger individuals, our relationship and bond has grown too. I spent this summer in Evanston in a studio apartment with just her, me, and our animals. It was challenging, but so wonderful, and despite how chaotic COVID made things, I’m really grateful for this summer. As we both near the end of our college career (her before me, as per usual) I’m grateful for how we’ve grown together and separately. And while I see how being a twin has caused some frustrations, I’m so glad I am a twin and especially glad to have my sister Eugenia in my life.