“I am the other one. I am always the other one.”

Clarice Lispector

People who grow up as twins understand the obsession to be loved more—the undeniable urge to be the one for your parents. It’s war when you’re a baby and a cold war when you grow older. At the dinner tables, people talk:

Who was born first?
Who cried louder?
Who calmed quicker?
Who walked first?
Who talked first?
Who was cuter, easier, more difficult, more sensitive, more “promising”?

And these people, they actually all ask one simple thing: Who is better? Every answer that your parents give is a silent verdict, and you are left with one black hole of a question: What is wrong with me?

Welcome to the Family

It takes one bad parent to turn the house into an ecosystem, a wild plain where you run, run and run; racing to the gates of approval. You learn which tone of voice signals drought, which sigh means a storm is coming.

You study the room the way creatures study their habitat—alert, reading the signs, adjusting yourself to stay alive in it. You know the prey. You know the predator.

And you learn your place in that food chain before you even understand it.

That Funny Feeling

And in this strange ecology, twins don’t simply grow up; they evolve in response to each other, often against each other, being whatever the other isn’t.

Like two very different houseplants. Fighting the same fight, under the same light, the same hands. One growing upward fast, chasing every scrap of sun. The other growing sideways, quietly, trying to survive in the shade. They learn to go their own ways, to grow their ecological revolutions, all for the same funny feeling: love.

And yet, beneath it all, twins share a root system, a “wood wide web”, a quiet place against the whole world. It’s thorny, it’s soft. Makes you bleed, makes you laugh. Makes you weak, makes you strong. It’s a hug, it’s a punch. It’s an end; it’s a beginning. It runs deep beneath the arguments, the parents, the comparisons, the teachers, the jokes, friend groups, beneath the wars; beneath everything and everyone you will become.

A tangle of shared beginnings, shared storms, shared soil, shared love, where you know, and you will always know, deep in your heart:

the fight,
the ache,
the hunger,
the love.