I was born with an identical twin sister. I know this isn't something that everyone can relate to, but for me it's where it all started. P.S. I'm the one in the Texas Tech shirt.
When I was growing up with my twin sister, it was a dream. I had a best friend, someone to have sleepovers with all the time, someone to always spend time with, and someone to go through life with. If you ask me about it now, I will tell you the same thing. I love having a twin sister. Of course, from the picture you can tell that we go to different schools, but that doesn't change how close we are. We talk almost every day and we share basically everything with each other....except clothes (we have completely opposite styles LOL). But it wasn't always that way, and still isn't sometimes.
See when you're growing up with another you, everything becomes a competition. And that's the biggest thing that I struggled with. I was always questioning if people liked me more than her, or if I was accomplishing things before her, or getting better grades in school. People were always comparing us and telling me who was prettier or more popular, which at a small school like ours, was a big deal, you either had all the friends, or no friends. And when I was going through middle school, I started getting bullied, which drove the biggest wedge between us. It pretty much made us the biggest enemies of each other. But for me, I was watching her fit in with everyone else while I sat on the outside. I was losing. I was watching her take everything away from me, and I didn't know how to fix it. For almost all of middle school and high school, I wondered if I would ever be good enough for anyone or anything because my twin sister was "winning" at everything.
I was constantly living in her shadow. She was more outgoing than me, better at school than me, and just better at fitting in in general. I kept trying to live up to her standards. But as I grew up I realized that we aren't the same person and don't have to accomplish the same things as each other. I don't have to do what she's doing and have the friends that she has. We knew going into our senior year that we were going to go to different colleges and start our own lives. Of course, like I said, we still talk almost every day but it's not the same as living with each other and in each other's lives. We have our own schools, our own friends, our own majors/minors/career goals. Once we realized that everything is not a competition and we were able to be our own people we became closer than ever. We share everything about our lives with each other. The way my sister put it, "We don't ever judge each other on any of our decisions or actions, we just tell each other and move on." We both know that no matter what we tell each other, there is no judgment.
It's easy to get sucked into comparing ourselves to each other, but there truly is nothing better than having a twin sister. It's true what they say, twins really are each other's best friend.
I say all this to remind you that comparing yourself to others is never the answer. Whether it's your identical twin sister like me, or your best friend, or just the person next to you in the gym or class. We are all our own persons, going through our own lives, writing our own stories.
"Your story is so unique and so different. It's not worthy of comparison." --SuperFastDiet
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