REFLECTIONS
The day I was born my mother gave birth to the same child twice. At least, that is how I live the first few years of life, indistinguishable from my sister. We have the same toys, the same friends, the same faces. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I seek to distinguish myself, but I imagine it is when I get to a point when I don’t want to be known simply as the twin in blue. Maybe I decided that I liked the endearing nickname of Lou Lou a whole lot more than the mistaken title of my sister Chels. Looking back, I can imagine myself as a baby staring into her reflection in the long hallway mirror, questioning who is inside. Is it her sister behind a translucent wall, or is that figure somehow herself? Lacan calls this phenomenon the mirror stage: when a child first identifies themself in a mirror and subsequently invents their perception of selfhood. Being an identical twin, I feel like I skipped this important stage of development. Because even now, as I look into a mirror, I still don’t recognize my own reflection.
In elementary school we are given an exercise that involves researching the origin of our names. The word Lindsey literally means ‘Island of Linden Trees’. It traces back to the Old English Lindsay and is one of the most popular names for females in the US. Up until 2007, I am proud to be called a Lindsey. After Googling what the hell a linden tree is, I briefly wonder if this is all I will ever amount to. Chelsea, my sisters name, translates roughly to: ‘Landing Place for Limestone’. I silently take back my criticism for my namesake and thank the linden trees. This is the first time I question what is in a name.
Being a twin is like being an actress there is constant pressure on you to perform. Stand side by side, our classmates demand, sandwiching us together. They examine every cut, every indent, with eyes raking up and down our bodies. My skin burns while they do, but my sister and I stand firm, used to the dissection by now. We exchange annoyed glances but say nothing. Sometimes I refuse and run away, but today is not one of those days. They tell us to repeat the same phrase, exclaiming joyfully when we do, like spectators at a circus performance. Totally identical, they conclude. They miss the introversion in my sister, her unique obsession with sharks, and her empathy in the thorough examination.
I am a hotheaded child. Most of my gym time is spent slipping across the glossy floor, chasing after anyone who dares refer to me by my last name only. This title I was once proud of has become a taunt people use when they refuse to learn my first name. My only rational response to this transgression is anger. I don’t take the time to explain why it upsets me, I just allow myself to coil and explode. One of these girls is a self-identified tattletale named Bridget. The other kids and I identify her instead as weird. The reason we assign this name to her is because she often cries in class and loses control of her bladder during games. I overhear the teachers calling it voiding dysfunction. I don’t try to understand, but instead avoid her all together. We don’t realize it yet, but we have classified diagnosis as a deterrent. My sister is better than me. She plays basketball on the sidelines and watches peacefully, always observant, ready to rush in at any moment.
Sea is the common sound my sister and I both share at the end of our names. Sea like the assonance when said together; Lindsey-Chelsea. We frequent the sea when my sister and I are young. We love getting swept up in the waves, bobbing slowly away from shore. We know we have gone too far when our silhouettes ripple in and out of sight, two identical pink suits lost to a mirage of icy crests. Our parents call us back soon enough, when we are indistinguishable from the waves, indistinguishable from one another. According to my fifth-grade science textbook, the size of a wave is determined by the amount of friction generated by the wind. It also says there are many different types of waves: Breaking, Deep Water, Shallow Water, Refracted. On this day, I am not here to examine the complexity of waves. I am here to watch them roll over me, big and small, without bothering to name them. Their beauty is not found in a title, but the memories generated within them.
I am eighteen and one can explain to me why bad things happen to good people. I watch as a friend loses a parent, a teacher loses a student, and a man in the news loses his home. My sister refuses to discuss this with me or anything existential for that matter. She says they stress her out too much. As bad as I feel for others’ sorrows, I cannot relate. My life has been relatively easy up to this point with no defining tragedy to cite. I am grateful for this, but also ignorant as a result. Cocky. Misfortune, I rationalize, is something that happens to other people. One of these individuals is a boy at my high school. On the first day of class he flaunts a hall pass that allows him to leave whenever he wants. We watch him go, standing up mid lecture and rushing to the bathroom without asking the teacher for permission. My friends and I grow envious of this magical hall pass. What did it take to get one?
Crohn’s Disease is hard to diagnose because the symptoms vary from person to person. Many people go years without detection. I am almost put in this category. When I tell my doctor I found mucus in the toilet and experience constant abdominal pain she dismisses my worries with the wave of a hand. It’s just constipation, she tries to assure me, prescribing a laxative. The only thing she has to go off of are my feelings, and feelings are hard to diagnose. No tests were taken that day.
My favorite coffee shop is located downtown, a few miles from my home. It is the local hipster joint, where the ash trays are always overflowing, and half of the employees have colorful dyed hair. I am lured by the individualism of the place and the people. A small part of me is envious. Everything about the place is distinctive. I see nothing about me that makes me unique. My sister dyed her hair with blonde accents senior year of high school. People got our names right for a little while, but it only lasted for as long as the dye did. At the cafe, there is a wall decorated with album covers which I stare at during lazy coffee dates. Today, my mother points out a particular one, a picture of two identical twins with their backs pressed together forming an arc. Gemini Twins, it reads. Look, it’s you two, she exclaims. I try to find myself in one of the girls but fail. Instead, I blink at my reflection on the album cover, watching as my reflection blinks back—
taunting me. My sister pretends to smile into her coffee. If autonomy is not found within a name or reflection where is it?
Her: “I am feeling anxious.”
Me: “Well can you not for just today?”
Say solutions, say critiques, say anything but I am sorry, or I would do anything for you.
While moving into my college dorm I accidentally break a mirror. I pick up the shards carefully and determine that it can be salvaged. The irony is not lost on me. In going off to college I am literally distorting who I am in order to re-define myself. I am starting off the next four years of my life with a blank slate, determined to make sure no one knows about my twin, regardless of the fact that we go to the same school. I do this by rarely making time to see her. During the season’s first football game, she shows up and approaches me while I am with my new friends. I don’t bother introducing her. Instead, I am dismissive. They are my friends. I don’t want to share; I have spent my entire life sharing. So, I pull her aside, embarrassed. She asks to take a photo with me, and I agree grudgingly before telling her to go sit somewhere else.
My sister is a Psychology Major and has to take a depression screening for class. I finish with no indication, my sister finishes with a phone number.
If you know someone who has ever gotten a colonoscopy, they have probably told you that it was an unpleasant experience. It is not necessarily the procedure that hurts, but the preparation. I fast for 24 hours and drink a gallon of laxative prep. It works so well that I am not able to sleep through the night. To occupy myself I watch movies. My sister sits beside me while I eat a plate of gummy bears, à la carte. I say I am fine. She holds me while I cry.
I interrupt my sister in her room crying. I ask her how often she does this. She tells me every night. I have to ask myself about the last time I cried. Even now, I play the comparison game in an effort to understand. I suggest she should quit track, eat less sugar, and meditate. She gives me vulnerability; I give her action steps.
I sit alone in the gastroenterologist office to go over test results. This is not the first time I have gone alone, but it is the loneliest. Usually I have someone to talk to. Instead my eyes rake lazily over the magazine rack. In our youth, my sister and I always went to doctor appointments together. It saved my parents a trip and since my sister was deathly afraid of shots—I provided moral support. Now I am in uncharted territory. The doctor enters and shakes my hand. Looking at my chart he smiles and asks. “A twin eh? Has she developed any symptoms?”
“No,” I reply sharply, maybe even a bit confidently, “She is totally normal.”
“Normal.” He considers the word, “Good. There is about a 50% chance she could develop the disease in the next ten years. Tell her to keep an eye out.”
I space out the entire ride home.
Three identical triplets are in my creative writing workshop. I get their names wrong and feel like a fraud. Nothing scares us more than a mirror.
My parents come to take us home and I watch as campus fades in the rearview mirror. The flowers are blooming and ripple like water in the breeze. My sister tells my parents that she isn’t happy here, that she cries every night. My parents ignore her and comment instead on the beautiful campus and how lucky we are to go there. My sister starts taking antidepressants.
Web MD becomes bookmarked on my computer at work. I scour it ravenously for clues about what is happening to my body, this savage stranger who is betraying me. Though treatments can’t cure Crohn’s disease, they can help most people lead normal lives. I contemplate the probability of the word: most.
There is a climactic scene in the film ‘The Florida Project’ when the mother is being restrained by authorities. She is helpless to stop them from taking her little girl away. Instead of articulating her concerns, she chooses to fight and ridicule them with her words. To emphasize how this is her only defense, the camera zooms into her mouth until it fades to another shot. She literally has to eat her words. You see, my professor remarks, people respond in anger when they do not have the words to express how they actually feel. You see this all the time, look at Trump’s supporters for God’s sake. They do not have the vocabulary to express what they are actually feeling; that they are scared and feel like their identity and values are being threatened. I contemplate all of the times I have been angry.
My sister is driving and talking about being sad. I am looking out the window, trying not to hear her. The sky is a foreboding grey. Suddenly, she snaps at me: You aren’t listening. You never listen. I rebuke her: Well it is hard to listen when you keep telling me the same stories over and over again. I watch as she sinks. I apologize. My pride has made me deaf. She resumes talking about being sad. I break. I sob. I confess.
It’s just so hard for me because for the first time ever I can’t relate to you and it kills me to think that you are sad so I ignore it and I get mad at you instead because that’s easier than accepting it is out of your control
and I am hurting from Crohns, too, and I wish you understood, but I am glad you don’t and I am jealous of your health and I am angry you can’t be happy…
I play the victim. I admit that I have no idea how to help her. I have no idea what to do. I-I-I– She listens patiently and considers. After a while, she responds: I am jealous of you too.
I often find my way back to my old hallway mirror. It’s a dusty thing coated in greasy fingerprints and unidentified stains. Maybe the reason I have not recognized my reflection is because I have allowed it to be clouded by anger. The answer to my identity has been in front of me all along; not in my name, not in my reflection, but in my stories. It was not the fact that I am a twin that made me any less of an individual, it is the fact that I reacted as if it were. We are defined by our experiences not our appearances and most of my favorite memories contain—not myself swimming alone in the sea—but the reflection standing there behind me. The one I have failed to notice for so long. There she stands, unwavering.
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Lindsey Schaffer is a writer and contributor to Chronically Lit, Metonym (forthcoming), and Variant Literature. You can find her on Twitter @LindseyAnn3.
