People

Family Fortunes: It’s hard to adapt to life apart from your twin

For the first time in my life I am completely on my own

Áine Kenny and her twin sister Hannah

Aine Kenny
Thu Nov 26 2015 - 11:00

Starting college can be daunting but perhaps even more daunting when you are facing the challenge as a lone twin. For the first time in my life I am completely on my own. I have no one to walk with me to the shops, no one to chatter incessantly with, no one to just be in the presence of.

It’s a unique feeling, being alone. Most people have experienced it at some stage, but if you have a twin you are close to, you simply haven’t.

When you are a twin, it’s a major part of your identity. Hannah and I would usually introduce ourselves as twins. But when I got to college, I found that it didn’t arise as a natural part of conversation any more.

I always informed people later on and they looked at me incredulously, as if I needed some tangible proof. This was something I had never experienced before. Everyone had just intrinsically known I was a twin because Hannah and I were inseparable.

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There are benefits to being a lone twin. People have a tendency to see twins in a way that erases their identities. Many used to address us as “the twins” instead of “Hannah and Áine”, and this really irritated me. Others commented on how we were going to separate colleges: how would we manage? Well, we aren’t conjoined.

The thing that I found most difficult was walking to my lectures alone, sitting alone, and having to actually be silent because there wasn’t someone there for me to talk to. I had always been the more talkative twin. So much so that Hannah actually lost her voice during her first week of college because she had so much more time to talk without me there.

I will always look forward to the weekends when I can go home and talk to Hannah for hours in an effort to try and share our lives again. But I guess that era is over now and we must adapt to this new style of friendship.

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