This is deep trauma.
It’s often preverbal, too, and many people never even knew they had a twin. In the case of identical twins, they share a lifelong epigenetic signature.
Their twinhood is written into their DNA.
Personally, I was born with an insecure attachment. I developed abandonment issues before taking my first breath. I didn’t latch onto my mother’s breast. I refused to be left in a crib and cried until she let me sleep in her bed. And I stayed there until I was 16 years old.
Sleepovers triggered panic attacks, so I refused all invitations to them, and school trips felt like dying.
To this day, I can’t change my sleeping arrangements because my body falls into panic.
And all of it makes sense.
My fraternal twin died in-utero. I have one ultrasound of him. There’s no proof that he was male, but my intuitive knowing and who I am tells me as much. I’ve always wanted a brother. And I didn’t verbalize this to anyone, including to myself, but it was clear in my behavior.
I only befriended boys. I wanted to wrestle and play with cars and sticks. I wanted to be masculine and inserted myself into their world.
My classmates deemed me weird. If I hung around boys so much, that must have meant I had crushes on them. I was teased, and so were the boys.
But I wasn’t romantically interested in them. When puberty hit, I developed zero feelings for any guy.
I never wanted to be in a relationship with them.
I wanted to explore forests, hone my fighting skills, play video games, talk about Lord of the Rings, dig in the mud, dance around a fire.
I wanted a substitute for my dead twin brother.
And when I didn’t find one, I substituted him myself. I rejected all things girly. I hated makeup, bras, dresses, skirts. I didn’t understand when the girls in my class gushed about guys. I didn’t care either until they wanted to know who I have a crush on, so I just said the name of a boy I’d never even talked to.
The desire for a brother is inexorably linked with the desire for a relationship, except for the romance.
I crave a bond that’s deeper than romantic love because my body has experienced such a bond once before. Due to this, I figured I must be aromantic and asexual. In truth, it's a symptom of my unprocessed loss.
For 23 years, I didn’t make sense to myself. I avoided thinking about my dead twin. I never realized his death traumatized my developing nervous system.
When I did, I cried for one year, every day. Under the guidance of somatic therapy, I took the first steps towards healing. Before this realization, I was running in circles. Because I hadn’t grasped the root.
And honestly, I haven't processed half of it.
There's so many accounts of twinless twins who share my psychological makeup. From an irrational fear of water as a child to inexplicable existential guilt, describing myself using "We" instead of "I", self-harm behaviors and a preoccupation with death since toddlerhood.
Maybe you feel like you're searching for something without knowing what. You try to live a life for two. Your earliest memories are saturated with an inner spiral of endless, black loneliness, even when you're surrounded by people you love.
If so, your dead twin might be the clunk of truth you were looking for.
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