Freakshow Coming Through

     My recent move to Brooklyn has meant more subway rides and therefore an increase in stares from fellow commuters. I am a walking freakshow. Why? One might ask. The reason is that I am a twin. We live together, go to school together, and sometimes work together. So we are together a lot. And this means that people are going to look at us and comment on our looks. We've gotten every reaction from excited to horrified (which I don't understand). It always confuses me when people look scared when they see us. Usually people say "That's so cute!" even though we're 21 and perhaps past the "cute" stage. In any case, some people just look wildly amused and don't say anything. Other people look terrified.
     It is interesting to have people recognize me. I was very used to it in my hometown. I grew up there, my parents are from there, my extended family lives there. Everyone knows everyone. Anyway, after 3 years of kicking around college it seems I'm also known for being a twin here, in this big old city. This is an example from home, but we had just turned 21 and couldn't go to the pediatrician anymore. So we're going to our new doctors office and when we get there the receptionist had "heard twins were coming." At a doctors office? Twins are this exciting? Is it because we're adult twins? I suspect this might be it. We've been on the street and a woman pointed us out to her probably 8 year old daughter. We're a freakshow because we walk around together I guess way past when people expect to see twins wandering around together. It doesn't help that we dress pretty similarly.
     Part of me loves this attention. It's nice to be noticed. But it's also a little strange and sometimes I don't want to be a walking form of entertainment. Now, I get excited when I see multiples. I think it's amazing. I love when I see other twins. But I also feel this sense of being a freakshow. Why is it so strange to see two people who look alike together? Along this branch, I feel like I rarely see adult twins together, but when I do I get even more excited. I feel that maybe they can relate to me on a "twin level."
     For example, Tegan and Sara Quin. They are twins who make up the band Tegan and Sara. I love their music but I also love their relationship. I do not know them personally (I wish) but the way they talk about each other and their twinship in interviews resonates with me so much. I think on a celebrity level (and maybe a twin level) they can relate to being gawked at. Anyway, their relationship also speaks to me as a twin. It makes me feel less strange and alone for so many reasons. Their music is amazing and speaks to me on other levels too.
     I have many conflicting feelings about being a walking, talking freakshow. Part of me loves it and part of me wants to be left alone. I just want to blend in. I am so indecisive that I will continue to field interesting stares and glances and out right comments. Perhaps this has to do with not feeling special when I am just me. Because I am special when I am with my sister and people let me know.

Here's to many more awkward stares and fun questions and interesting conversations!

   

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since you died. Everything is a blur since coming to college. But that is not the case for you because you’re not here anymore. You're not here and it makes no sense. Reading your sisters Facebook status, talking about you and the day they found out. I have my own memories from that day. But to hear what happened. The uncertainty and hoping for the best but expecting the worst. And then it was the worst the came true.

 I remember going to your house with my mother – we were childhood best friends, always hanging out and together, and I went to your house with my mother after we found out you had died. It was so hard not to be upset and so hard not to cry – but why was I crying? I hadn't talked to you in a while. Maybe it was being in that kitchen that I remember so much from growing up. And seeing your mom – she looked so tired and frail and she told us you looked like you just had a bad wisdom teeth surgery. That you were in tact. That your face was just a little bruised and swollen. I was falling apart yet she was able to hold it together. I always wonder what she thinks of when she sees me and my sister – does she think about what you could have been? Does she think about the past? She always talks about you when I see her. It’s gotten easier but I still like to avoid her. I never know what to do or say. It makes me uncomfortable. 

And then there was Coach Fish the first day of your wake. She's also the one that got a bunch of us together to talk about you. So that we could try and deal with such a tragedy. But the first day of your wake she made us all go over to your house to help get things together. It was so sad for me to be there looking through your stuff, looking through who you were – your track pins and letter, culinary uniforms and achievements, old pictures – I don’t know how to deal with this. I can’t figure out why this is hitting me so hard this year, after all, it is the second one. Maybe this is the reality of it. Although I wouldn't have even remembered if it hadn't been for your sisters Facebook status. And now I’m seeing more status updates about you, today may be harder than I anticipated. In fact I wasn't anticipating anything about today. Both now and when I found out. I couldn't possibly believe it was you who had been in that house.

I wonder if your death reminds me of not only losing you but also of all the other people I've lost. I wonder if I think about not losing you to death but before that, to life. We kind of lost track of each other in high school, grew apart. Only saw each other every now and then after graduation. Our lives were in different places, we wanted different things I guess. Maybe this is just what I tell myself to make me feel okay about us not being friends in the end. To be fair, we weren't not friends, but we weren't close. I didn't know what was going on with you and you didn't know what was going on with me. I wanted to hang out with different people. I’m bad at managing my time I guess, and I didn't make time for you. And then it was too late to make time for you. 

I don’t usually feel guilty when people die. I don’t feel guilty about my grandmother and how much time I spent with her, my mother always feels guilty. I wonder if she feels guilty about you? Maybe I feel more guilty about you than I thought. I also wonder how she dealt with all of it. Did she imagine her child being the one that was gone? I cried so much for you when it first happened, and then my life went back to normal. 

I think about you more than I thought I did – a lot of things remind me of you. I guess I just don’t think of you being dead. But you are in fact dead, you are gone, lost to another place. A place I cannot imagine and a place that I think I am afraid of. But the point is you aren't here with us,  with your family more importantly. I don’t know where any of this is going. I guess I’m just spewing out what came to my mind after seeing your sisters Facebook status. I have so many great memories with you and of who you were, maybe that’s what I’m thinking about. Maybe it’s that I just can’t stand the thought of a person being here one minute and gone the next, especially a person that I knew and cared about.  

Semi-Coherent Rant About Myself

     I want to start writing again. I don't do anything else. All I do all day is watch TV, sometimes wander outside, read, play Sims 3, hang out, cruise around on tumblr. I want to care again. I want to be critical of the world again. I don't know when I stopped being critical. I don't know when I became so compliant and just started going along with things. I don't know why or when I started defending the government instead of coming up with a new solution all together. I'm tired of being complacent.
     I afraid I'm not good enough though. I'm afraid of my privilege. I'm afraid that it means I can't have a voice because I'm white, middle class, in college, cis. Yes I'm a woman and I'm a lesbian, but I can pass as straight. I'm afraid that I'm not allowed to have a voice because of all of my privilege. I want to be profound and have a direction again. I feel lost and floundering lately.
     I don't want to care about stepping on peoples toes when they are ignorant. I'm sick of making excuses for people. I hate upsetting people. I hate confronting people. I hate fighting. Perhaps I shouldn't be using this blog as my journal for the moment, but it's my blog and I can do what I want with it. I have nothing profound to say, that's why I don't write more. I can write about my feelings and that's about it. This is the end of my unfortunate rant on the current state of myself.

My Brief Stint as a Message Board Addict

     I used to be on message boards all the time. I guess they provided a community I didn't have, or didn't think I had, at the time. It was mostly when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. They were my life. I obsessed over my screen name. I recognized people on the boards. E-mailed some of them. It was back in the days of Myspace, so I was "friends" with some people on there. It's so interesting how being online can make you feel like you aren't so alone. Being on a message board you are surrounded by people who are interested in the same things you are. I definitely needed to feel less alone my freshman year. But I go on that same message board know and I realize that I don't know anyone any more. And I have to realize that that part of my life is over. I'm glad that it is though. 

     I had lost my best friend. My life felt like it was falling apart. And I guess it might be kind of pathetic, but going on the Grey's Anatomy message boards gave me somewhere to go. It gave me somewhere to be okay and if I wasn't okay, that was okay too. No one knew me. No one knew how I went from being a happy, care free teenager to a constantly crying, angry, self harming teenager. On the message boards I wasn't anyone. I was faceless. I got to show people what I wanted to show them. In "real" life I wear my heart on my sleeve. I can't really hide how I am feeling at any given moment. But online I don't have to reveal anything. I really liked that. No one had to think I was "crazy" and losing it. 

     This time of my life has shaped how I experience relationships and how I deal with stress, sadness, and disappointment. It has made me question everything about myself. A lot of the time I forget that I had this community though. People from all over who were equally as obsessed with the happenings of a fictional drama. Maybe it was a way of escaping for me. A way to get away from all the pain I was feeling at school and that was carrying over to home. Anyway, I'm glad that I had that place. A place for me to feel a little better and a little like I belonged. I'm glad that I don't need that now though. 

     Now I feel like I have enough of a support system from the people I can talk to face-to-face. I feel like I don't need an online community as much. I also feel like a lot of the people that were on the Grey's boards at the same time as me aren't there anymore. I also don't watch the show, so I wouldn't be on those boards anyway. I guess I'm just thinking all of this because for some reason I was compelled to go look at the message boards. They're way different from when I was on there and the people either aren't the same or they've changed their names. But I don't need that community anymore. I'm lucky enough to have awesome people in my life now that I didn't feel like I had when I was a freshman in high school. This whole post seems almost pointless, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that an online community can be so important for people (I see this on tumblr now) and that I'm happy that I'm not in that place anymore.

What it Means to be a Twin

     It came to my attention recently that I have never tried to describe to someone what it is like to be a twin. I was complaining that sometimes love interests or friends don't understand what it is like to be a twin and a unit. She followed by asking me if I had ever tried to explain it someone. I couldn't believe that I hadn't and was then at a loss for what to say and where to start. The person I was talking to told me to try and describe it to her. After I was done bumbling through my answer she said she understood what I was saying, but I'm not sure how articulate I actually was. So I'm going to try and do it here. As that was my original reason for starting this blog!
     I'm just going to jump in - being a twin for me is being half of a unit. It is not being able to survive if the other person isn't alive. It is wanting to run home and share everything, even the little insignificant things, with my sister. It is sitting outside a classroom for 45 minutes because I haven't seen her all day and I want to talk to her the moment she gets out of class. Its being on the same wavelength, dressing alike accidentally. Having someone understand where I have been, where I am now, and where I'm going. It is loving someone and depending on them in a way that almost isn't healthy. Being a twin for me is having someone who is always there to talk, to listen, to go on adventures with.
     There is also a more negative side to twinship. It's being willing to sacrifice my own happiness for my sisters. It's willing to be held back or inconvenienced. It's dragging someone somewhere they don't want to go but essentially making them go anyway.
   To me, these inconveniences or negative aspects are far outweighed by the good. One of my favorite quotes about twins is "the love is so intense, but so is the hate". Not that I hate my sister, but there are moments when I want to strangle her. I like this quote because I feel like it sums up the intensity of being a twin and the feelings that can go along with it. This is what being a twin is like in my eyes. I'm not sure if this is any more articulate or if it leaves more questions. In any case, this is my attempt to explain what being a twin is like.


As Abigail Pogrebin said in her book "One in the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've learned about Everyone's Struggle to be Singular" -

"Being an identical twin - I can't speak for fraternals - is intense. It's all the cliches: feeling like you have an unwavering partner in life, knowing exactly what another person feels, wanting to tell her a story before anyone else, confiding with unrestrained - sometimes shocking - candor, valuing her opinion above anyone else's, taking on someone else's pain to the point of vicarious depression, being incapacitated by a minor dispute." - Abigail Pogrebin, One and The Same

     This quote eloquently sums up my feelings about being a twin and what that means for me in my life.