The Torment of Two: The Truth about Being an Identical Twin

By Meher Hakim 

‘Lucky’ is the word I hear when I tell people that I have an identical twin. 

I’m lucky to never feel alone, to always have someone to confide in and share my life with; lucky to have someone to experience the world with, to walk through every stage of life with hand-in-hand; lucky to have someone look like you and always look out for you. 

Lucky is not the word I would use. While my twin sister is irrefutably my soulmate, our bond assures paranoia and pain. 

A peculiar phenomenon occurs when you’re an identical twin. While everyone marvels over the concept of your duplicity, you lose your individuality entirely. Never an ‘I’, and always a ‘we’, you become a metonymy. 

Somewhere along the way, my sister and I lost our identities as ‘Meher’ and ‘Maha’, and simply became ‘the twins’. Our two wholly unique parts disappeared. We were only seen as a whole. Contradictorily, by only being seen as a whole, we also became an anomaly in need of scrutiny and separation, a mystery that even strangers feel they must solve. 

You’re skinnier. Her ass is bigger. She’s got wider hips. You’ve got thinner lips. She’s a bit fatter. Her degree doesn’t really matter; she’s not as smart. Are you the one with the messed-up heart? People have always torn into us as they try to tell us apart. 

Getting accustomed to the constant comparisons as a twin makes looking in the mirror a little different. You begin looking for flaws before people point them out to soften the blow for yourself. Like magicians, they make new ones appear all the time.

The most painful part of being a twin isn’t the scrutiny, though. The most painful part is knowing that one of us will eventually lose our soulmate. A true soulmate: not a soulmate of circumstance or time, but one that is irreplaceable and unremitted by infidelity, distrust or distance.

My beautiful, caring sister is a soulmate that I will only ever lose through death, a dreadful realisation I have to live with until it’s no longer simply a realisation. One day, the matching brown eyes that share a secret language and find refuge and ease in their chestnut pair will search to no avail. Eventually, one of these pairs will weep in silence at the absence of the other. 

The constant fear of losing my sister has made me cynical towards love, knowing the fierce bond I share with her constructs no protection or guarantee over how much of my life I will get to share with my soulmate. Accordingly, I live in a constant state of paranoia, knowing any second may be the last I spend with my irreplaceable soulmate. 

There is a common misconception about soulmates – that they are each other’s halves. True soulmates are not simply two fragmented souls that complete each other. Rather, soulmates are two independent, whole souls that come together, intertwine and fuse together. Both souls dig under each other and lay roots, blossoming beautifully and mutually together. 

I imagine losing a soulmate requires a violent ripping of this powerful union; a ripping that doesn’t leave you with a clean-cut of your original soul but takes a large part of your soul with it, bits of your soul clinging to the roots of the other in hopes that it will stay. I imagine the tear it leaves continuously bleeds and widens until you lose not only your soulmate but your own soul. 

So, no. Neither I nor my sister are lucky to be twins. While the love and bond we share is ineffable, our lives will forever be characterised by scrutiny, insecurity, paranoia and, worst of all, the promise of harrowing, consuming heartbreak from which we can never heal.