This morning, I realized that my life is a function of my twin sister's - and that's just fine with me. 47 1/2 years into this twinship, I'm at peace with it.

People want me to have my own life, to pursue a path separate from that of my sister. They are singletons and just don't get it - there is no life separate from my twin. How could they get it? They view us (twins) as freaks, in the nicest possible way. I mean, we don't belong in a freak show (or do we?). But we are oddities among the normal.

I always thought it would be useful for psychologists to study how twins separate and individuate, rather than keep that stupid focus on how alike we are. You know, "separated at birth but both are cowboys!" "They buy the same clothes! Named their cats the same thing!" So what? As my sister says, duh, we have the same body type and coloring, why wouldn't we dress alike?

I actually think human beings trend toward looking alike. In my office one day, every other person came in wearing the exact same color combination - dark red and black. There were 15 of us in the exact same colors - even though some were blond and some brunette, some black and some white, some male and some female. What are the odds of that? I think that over time we all picked up subtle clues about what colors occurred most often and thus would contribute to creating the most harmonious workplace. Of course, that was our goal - to have harmony.

I suppose you could see people wearing radically different clothes at work as indicative of a conflict-ridden culture. Like my last job - major differences in what people wore. I could tell that I was making headway in creating a team when a few of us showed up in the same color combinations a few times. Alas, I am gone from that job.

Lest one thinks that it is my "twin power" creating all this synchronicity, I'll remind you that women living together for some length of time end up having their monthly cycles coincide. And people look like their dogs. And married people end up looking alike. We like "likeness." Many of us certainly like looking at ourselves in the mirror. We actually think that people who can't look at themselves in the mirror have some kind of mental infirmity - self-hatred or no-self-esteem.