Questions I’m tired of answering every day:

What’s it like being a twin? How do people tell you apart? Do you guys share a room? Do you have bunk beds? Is every night like a sleepover where you stay up late and tell each ot her secrets? Do you guys share clothes? Is twin telepathy real? Who’s older? Is there an evil twin? Do you think you’ll go to the same college?

Only my fellow twins can relate to the constant ignorant questions that are spat at us.

Being an identical twin has been the most bittersweet and confusing experience of my life.

I had no control over being born a twin. God was kind of just like, “Hey, I guess we’ll have this fertilized egg split randomly and form two embryos that will form identical twins.”

To be honest, I think it’s unfair that things happened that way, but they did. And because they did, I’ve had to deal with questions and guessing games almost every day of my life.

Would someone please tell me where all these questions and false twin expectations came from?

I blame media for the stereotypical perceptions about twins. Thanks Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen for your exaggerated twin adventures in various books and movies. Thanks The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay Lohan number two. Thanks Sister, Sister with Tia and Tamara Mawry. It’s your fault for portraying twin lifestyles and perpetuating falsehoods that everyone believes to be true.

However, being a twin isn’t that bad once you take away the whole getting mixed up and people not being able to tell the difference between the two twins aspect. It has its fun perks, but it aggravates me when non-twins say they wish they had a twin; when people say this, I have a feeling that they’re not aware of what they’re wishing for.

It seems being an identical twin is an inconvenience for those who cannot distinguish between two twins. Sorry, twins look alike. No, I will not wear a nametag for you or dye/cut my hair or get my name tattooed on my forehead just so you can tell the difference between my twin and myself. And I apologize for being this way, really. But take your anger out on my mother or fate or whoever is responsible for this inconvenience.

Please don’t make it into some sort of fun game when guessing which twin is which. The moment will come where you muster up a hopeful guess of which twin is which and… you’re wrong.

You’ll beat yourself over the head because you were so sure! You felt there was no way you could be wrong because you truly thought you had it this time!

And you’ll apologize and say, “Well you guys must be used to that by now, right?” And we routinely respond something about how we get it all the time and not to worry about it, nothing was taken personally.

But deep down, we hope you’ll eventually get it right so we don’t have to keep responding to both our own name and our twin’s name.

All that can be asked of a non-twin is to simply put in some effort, get to know us as individuals, and try to be able to tell the difference.