I always loved School Spirit week; I guess most kids do. I especially relished Twin Day and the challenge of styling myself so exactly like someone else that one might be mistaken for the other. I didn’t have a singular best friend I matched with, instead rotating through the girls with whom I spent my afternoons, at playdates or soccer practice. Sometimes the twin decision came down to who had the same Mini Boden graphic tee as me. 

It was a symbol of our closeness that we had coordinated the effort to look alike, and the effort required a trust in something I couldn’t name then. I felt subliminally the burden of entering a contract; like my reputation was partly attached to someone else, and I was afraid.

Many years past the tribulations of elementary school, one of my closest friends looks like me. I look like her. Shira and I look so much alike that her mother sees photos of me in silver spiral earrings and thinks they’re old pictures of her younger self. We look so much alike that a woman we both know quite well crossed a room to congratulate me on finishing law school, beaming. (I absolutely did not attend law school.) Constantly: Are you sisters? Are you twins? Is that your older sister? (I am older, by two days.)

On Shira’s Instagram grid, I count three instances where I appear, in a photo she took of me, where it looks like I could be her. A comment: Like if you thought that was Shira. [8 likes]

In 1902, sociologist Charles Cooley developed the theory that one only understands oneself in relation to what and who she encounters in society. Cooley borrowed the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson to give his concept a name: “Each to each a looking-glass / Reflect the other that doth pass.” Cooley writes, “As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.”¹ 

No Exit’s proverbial line “Hell is other people” elides the detail that there are no mirrors in Sartre’s staging of Hell. The woman is desperate for confirmation that she exists. The other woman, in an attempt at seduction, promises to be an accurate mirror. But what she says is frightening: “Suppose the mirror started telling lies?”

Sometimes Shira has me try on a dress to see if she likes how it looks, because that is somehow more accurate than a mirror. I allow her to see me instead of herself; or, her as me as her.

The “mirror effect” is a term that gets thrown around a lot to justify random behavior theories. It’s been used to describe such disparate concepts as projecting unexamined aspects of ourselves onto others,² parroting the mannerisms of the people you hang out with the most,³ and the contagious narcissism of the archetypal early-2000s celebrity spreading through the wider culture.⁴ The term was deployed in a small study where undergrad psych students completed questionnaires peppered with suicide-related words; half of the participants sat in a room with empty walls for the duration of the task, while the other half faced their reflection in a mirror. The results support the hypothesis that a high level of self-awareness “seems to increase the desire to escape self-awareness, and thereby brings suicide thoughts to the fringe of consciousness.”⁵

Michael Baldwin’s Untitled Painting (1965) is a roughly 2×3-foot mirror mounted on canvas and hung on a gallery wall. When it was on display at the Tate Modern in London in the 2010s, it was one of the museum’s most frequently shared artworks on social media. It is currently in storage. 

For over a year I didn’t have a full-length mirror. One day Shira moved to live with her boyfriend and gave me hers.

It goes beyond looks, as we exist in each other’s lives as more than doppelgängers. I’m not even entirely sure that is what we are. According to photographer François Brunelle, who has made portraits of lookalike pairs for the last 25 years, “this idea of ‘likeness’ is very elusive.” Is a way of seeming the same as a way of being? I often implicate Shira in my writing,⁴ finding in our conversations or experiences creative fodder. A double invokes the uncanny, invites inspection into the truth of the image. Sometimes a twin is a foil. Shira will be laughing as she reads this. Greta is using me again.

Our relationship is made of mutual fondness, trust, understanding, history, and taste. This last pillar is where we are competitive. We formed and keep forming who we are alongside each other. We let each other see. Something about Cooley’s theory reminds me of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale “The Snow Queen” and the fragments of a devil’s mirror that turn a boy evil when he steals a glance. We may hold up flatteringly warped dressing-room mirrors, but I think we are delicate with each other. I think we are very different people, and I like that. No, I am not the future lawyer; I am a writer and I wrote an affirmation of good moral character for the future lawyer’s admission to the bar.

While our friendship has led me on great quests, such as noticing twinning in life and in other people’s art, it doesn’t protect us from ourselves. I spend an incredible amount of time wondering and worrying about how I might be perceived by people who I haven’t met who encounter me online. I feel like I’m not in control of the impression I make and this causes me to spiral. It is as if I have a twin, a digital twin, and we play nice until at night in our bunk bed we brawl until we fall asleep. My digital twin and I meet in places I’d forgotten about: Blogspot, a Google Drive folder titled B.C.E. I don’t always recognize her and I don’t always want to. Recently I introduced myself at a party to someone I know from the internet and she told me I was a beauty, and instead of taking the compliment graciously all I could think about was her surprise. 

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry writes that beauty compels or even requires us to reproduce what we see: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”⁵ Mimicry, supposedly the highest form of flattery, is very hard to get right. It depletes authenticity, siphons the life force that gave rise to the original with every attempt at duplication. While ultimately a shallow critique of the beauty industry, 2024 film The Substance argues that two of the same cannot coexist peacefully, that the promise of “a better version of yourself” when the original version is locked in the bathroom closet is an impossible one. 

Biological twins, both fraternal and identical, are particularly prone to self-differentiation. They are less likely to get lost in their attempt to relate to another. Perhaps there’s something to accepting the ways in which we twin, embracing identification instead of rejecting sameness/likeness as a threat to one’s specialness. If I detached from the comfortable conception of a stable self then I could be as open and full of possibility as an old house cleared of all its furniture. No furniture but an antique mirror leaning on the wall.

Below are some projects that have engaged with doubles, mirrors, lookalikes, and twins. As you embark: if there could be two of you, would you be you?

FACE ID

HORRIFIC ASSUMPTION

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

VIRTUAL MIRROR MAZE

1. Cooley, C. H. The Looking-Glass Self. 1902. ↩︎
2. https://www.tiktok.com/@ann_natalie/video/7277315132143750443?q=mirror%20effect&t=1730071648956 ↩︎
3. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lifetime-connections/202312/the-chameleon-effect-why-we-mirror-friends-and-lovers ↩︎
4. Pinsky, Drew., et al. The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America. New York, HarperCollins, 2009. ↩︎
5. Selimbegović L, Chatard A. The mirror effect: self-awareness alone increases suicide thought accessibility. Conscious Cogn. 2013 Sep;22(3):756-64. ↩︎
6. https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a44567428/the-gamification-of-reading-is-changing-how-we-approach-books/; https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/art_books/Eugene-Richardss-Remembrance-Garden/; https://dirt.fyi/article/2024/05/my-first-book ↩︎
7. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press, 1999. ↩︎