“Hey, twinnie – which one are you? Will one of you go out with me? I don’t care which one.” 

Welcome to the world of identical twins, where individuality is overlooked, identity is ignored, and any sense of selfhood is smothered by observers too lazy and/or horny to tell us apart.

For identical twins, it can be a daily challenge to speak in the first-person singular because for us, “we” comes easier than “I”. For me and my identical twin sister, Willow, that proclivity holds true today, even though we have spent the past 25 years in different hemispheres and haven’t lived in the same city since we graduated, both in English, both with Honours, both from the University of Vermont in the United States. 

But decades of time and oceans of distance can’t undo the formative experiences of identical twinness. Since we were old enough to understand language, we’ve known ourselves only in comparative terms. We have been declared smarter, dumber, fatter, thinner, slower, faster, prettier, uglier, better or worse than the person who is our genetic match. 

Today, I have a visceral response to adjectives that end in “er”. Deep in my solar plexus, I recognise that, whichever side of the ledger I am apparently on, my womb-mate is on the other. My win is her loss. And vice versa. 

My identical twin brain boggles: how can one of us be “prettier” when we can unlock each other’s phones using Face ID? 

As American-born kids being raised in Aotearoa by academics, we spent our first 16 years moving between the urban streets of Dunedin and the rural roads of Vermont. Being twins gave us much-needed comfort as we traversed the foreign worlds of international school systems. 

We had each other – for solace, socialising, and even scandal – like when Willow’s prom date left the dance holding my hand. Or when, at the end of one high school championship relay race, our four-person team was summoned over the loudspeaker to the judges’ tent. They were convinced we’d cheated by having the first runner run twice. As Willow and I entered the tent, the look on the judges’ faces was worth any risk of disqualification. 

Entering adulthood, we faced our first professional stressor on the twinship bond. As freelance writers, we both wanted to establish our voices and by-lines in a market tight on freelance budgets and column inches. As we pitched similar stories to the same editors, twin tension threatened not only our livelihoods but also our friendship. It took several counselling sessions, many tears, and an explicit agreement about who would write where (Willow moved into magazines; I sought out newspapers) to restore our relationship. The experience taught us that our greatest challenge was (and is) to simultaneously enjoy our differences and celebrate our similarities. 

That celebration was on full display one evening in late 2015, when Willow visited me in Auckland. As a surprise, I booked us front row seats to the Topp Twins. Sitting in the front row, bedecked in matching leopard-skin dresses, we felt stunned disbelief when Lynda and Jools entered stage right, surveyed the audience, spotted us, and beckoned us to join them for the opening act.

Twin powers activated – we danced in four-part, stereophonic synchronicity that only twins (or hours of rehearsing) can create. Those five minutes on stage with the doyennes of Kiwi entertainment will forever be the highlight of our identical twin lives.

A few years later, in the comfort of our separate living rooms and time zones, we challenged each other to create Bitmoji profiles. When it was time for the great reveal, we were delighted and relieved that AI had transformed us into identical avatars:

Which brings me to the matter of hair. 

For the past year, my shoulder-length, dyed-for-decades auburn locks have been invaded by an army of silver strands. Add in Auckland humidity, and the fact I wear either a swim cap or a bike helmet five days out of seven, et voila – hair horror. In contrast (thanks to the dry Californian air and a lack of local swimming pools), Willow is rocking her locks.

Why not follow the lead of so many awesome wahine who have surrendered to the silver battalion and embraced the grey? Because the prospect of changing my hairstyle splinters my very foundation of selfhood. If I look different from my twin, who the hell am I? 

And then it happened. Last week, as I was bemoaning the state of my hair to a girlfriend, she reminded me that her hairdresser is known as “Kohimarama’s Goddess of Grey”. Poring through her Instagram feed, I saw Tania, a woman of a certain age who gave her long, dark mop a no.2 buzzcut and has spent the last two years growing her hair back to its grey glory. She looked amazing. I booked in for the following Saturday. I didn’t tell Willow.

The night before my appointment, I had a nightmare: I was stumbling, bald and near-blind, through strange, empty buildings, where cracked mirrors reflected distorted visions of my visage. I woke convinced I had developed alopecia, finding reassurance only after running my fingers through my tangled locks and reminding myself that I had the power to choose whether to keep or cut them. 

In the morning, as I settled into the hairdressing chair, I felt a deep sense of calm. Maybe I was just buggered – but when the Goddess of Grey explained it would take a year to maintain my current hairstyle and gradually transition to grey, I stopped her mid-sentence. “F..k it, let’s just cut it off and start again.” 

Five hours later, a pile of stressed-out tresses lay on the floor, and my head sported a jaunty pixie cut that cleverly blends my own, long-resisted grey with nuanced strands of charcoal and silver. It feels light. It feels liberating. I love it. 

So does Willow, who cheered when I FaceTimed her to show her my new do. Will she cut hers? That is yet to be seen. 

So, who am I? As an identical twin who for the first time looks noticeably different from her biological doppelgänger, I am still figuring that out. Despite sharing profound memories and life experiences, we have never fit the stereotype of identical twins who spend every waking moment together. At the risk of imposing a comparative on ourselves, I can’t help but wonder: are twins who live more identical lives “better” twins than us? 

The day after my radical haircut, I had breakfast with a friend who had recently seen my longer-haired twin in California. She greeted me with a hug and an exclamation: “You look just like your sister!” And therein lies the answer. Regardless of our different lifestyles and hairstyles, our shared genes imbue us with an unbreakable bond and an innate alikeness. 

Which means we’ll always have the same response to the age-old question posed to identical twins: “Hey, twinnie, where’s your other half?”

“She’s over there, just cloning around.”