Thursday, January 27, 2011

Two Peas in a Pod

Bri and I are always asked if there is a trick to telling us apart or if we have any distinct features that make us look different from each other. I think the answer is actually pretty simple: we don’t look alike. I was talking to Brianna about this the other day because everyone at work is having trouble telling us apart since we have to wear the same uniform. I think she explained it best when she said, “When I look into the mirror, I don’t see Britt staring back at me. I see myself. “
So the question is, do identical twins look exactly the same? I personally don’t think so. Like Brianna said, I always see myself when I look at pictures or in the mirror, not Bri. When we tell anyone that we don’t think that we look alike at all, they usually look at us like we’re crazy.  I guess we just see ourselves differently than everybody else does.
I personally think that as we’ve gotten older, we don’t look very similar anymore. When we were little, it was a different story. We looked almost exactly the same and even I can’t tell us apart in some of the pictures!  (My Mom can’t either!) I guess my family would paint our nails different colors so they wouldn’t get confused and mistake Bri for me or vice versa. We also had t-shirts with our names on them that said, “I’m Brittany. That’s my twin sister Brianna.” I think it’s pretty silly, but I guess it worked for them!
Now that we’re older, I think it’s funny that people can’t tell us apart. Sometimes other students will start talking to me about a test or quiz and I have no idea what they are talking about.  After staring at them dumbfounded for quite some time, I usually realize that they think I’m Bri. Recently we’ve both resorted to saying hi to people we don’t know to avoid explaining that we are twins and to also spare the feelings of the people we’ve ignored because we didn’t know them. Life seems much easier that way!
However, when I talk to my friends, they say that when they first met us we looked completely identical, but now they can tell us apart.  They say that it’s easy now and they don’t know why they couldn’t tell before. I’ve noticed that when I’ve know someone for a long time, they can easily tell us apart. I’m not sure why this happens, but it is very common.
To answer the question, to other people we look exactly the same. However, to Brianna and I, we feel as though we look like completely different people.

4 comments:

  1. I think it's sweet that you two have found your personal ideentities. Have you ever heard of Tia and Tamera Mowry? They were on Sister, Sister. The public can even tell them apart, but that's because Tamera has a small mole on her face and Tia has her own hot show now. Idk, I just felt the need to bring them up Lol.

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  2. Two of my best friends in high school were also identical twins. When I first met them, I had no idea how I was going to tell them apart. But once I got to know them, they didn't look alike at all to me anymore! Definitely once you get to know a pair of twins, you almost identify them on their personality and they are just like two non-lookalike people. It's a strange concept but it's something that definitely makes sense when two of your best friends are twins and especially for you, being a twin! Cute blog!

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  3. This reminds me of my cousins, they're twins and while everybody in the family can tell them apart, everybody else think they're the same person. Now they attend different schools and one of them got a dramatic haircut, so it's easier to tell them apart, but they have other distinct qualities and interests that make it easy to tell them apart.

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  4. [It might be worth changing the font on these comments--small and very difficult to read in its current form...]

    We had two identical twins in my fraternity in college, and they couldn't be more different from each other. I think that one of the things that helped was that their personalities were quite different. So their body language alone was a quick indicator of which Richardson brother you were dealing with. You could tell from seeing one of them across campus, since even their gait was quite different.

    On the other hand, I had two brothers in my class last spring who sat next to each other (and not always in the same seats--they switched sides). I'm not sure if it was that they were in the back of the room, but unless they were actually up front giving a speech, I couldn't tell which was which, even by the end of our fifteen weeks together.

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