Premise: My experiences

My experience of these two themes:

Being a twin

My brother and I are fraternal twins meaning we share a birthday but are actually no more identical than normal siblings.  It’s weird to think that we have known each other literally our whole lives… including in utero. We were born two minutes apart, with my brother being older, which he never failed to hold over me as children, exclaiming every year on our birthday for those two minutes, that he was a whole digit older than me. We were born three months early, which as you can imagine was very unexpected for our parents, and so we spent the first few months of our lives in hospital.

Growing up as twins we were always very competitive. Everything was a challenge of who could do it better or a race of who could do something first. Everything we did or got had to be equal, so if one got something, the other had to have the same.

We shared a bedroom up to the age of 4, as we then moved house and got our own rooms. We always played together at home, creating imaginary games, playing with toys or playing on the Nintendo Wii.

Sharing birthdays was never a problem because we had never known any different, and it added to the excitement as we had someone to be excited with. When it came to birthday presents, our parents had to either buy two of the same thing or make sure that what we got was equal otherwise someone was bound to get upset.

Being at primary school in the same class, was sometimes a challenge when we would fight as siblings do, but we were able to look out for each other.

When we were young children, we had shared birthday parties, meaning that there was always double the amount of people and of course two cakes. As we got older we had separate birthday parties, especially after going to secondary school, as we went to separate schools.

As teenagers, we got on each other’s nerves, always looking for ways to wind each other up. We compared ourselves to each other, especially when it came to things like our GCSE grades.

Nowadays, my brother is away at uni, but when he is home we still manage to annoy each other but I feel like we are better friends now than we were as teenagers as we help each other out and actually like to spend time with each other.

People often don’t assume we’re twins, as I think my brother looks older than me. Some people say that we look alike, although others say that they don’t see the resemblance.

My brother’s point of view

“Everything had to be equal as children, for example when blowing out birthday candles we would always have to blow them out together and then have a turn blowing them out individually. We were probably more competitive and there was more comparison between us, compared to siblings of different ages. We have always shared a birthday so we don’t know any different. Often when people find out that I’m a twin they make a comment like ‘oh I suppose they do look quite similar’. Also some people are really surprised to find out you’re a twin, for example at uni it doesn’t always come up that I’m a twin, then people are surprised when they’ve known me for a bit and then find out.”

Shyness

I don’t ever remember not being shy, from a young age I remember not wanting to talk to people and wanting to hide behind my mum. At primary school I remember being shy, making it harder to make friends and talk in class but I did have a best friend who I was not shy around. That’s the thing, once you got to know me I wasn’t shy at all.

 I never wanted to talk to strangers, always asking my mum things like if she would order at a restaurant for me. I was always told that I needed to speak up, talk louder, but to me I didn’t sound quiet. Without a doubt, I was told at every parents evening at school that I needed to participate more in class, but I how could I begin to compete with my outgoing peers.

 Everyone knew me as the shy one and so instead, at things like family gatherings, they would engage in conversation with my more outgoing brother. My mum would tell me that people just assumed that I didn’t want to talk to them, but I always found that a bit unfair. If people did talk to me, I would try and talk to them, but sometimes I was left worried that they thought I was being rude.

At school I used to dread things like doing presentations in front of the class as I hated having all eyes on me and would wish that the teachers could make an exception.

I didn’t like the fact that I was shy, and wished that I could be more outgoing person, but looking back it was what made me, me.