On missing deadlines
It’s difficult to overestimate the impact that having a twin sister has had on my life. I wouldn’t call her my ‘other half’ or say that we’re soul-mates, or any of the other weird, creep-ish twin-style expressings I’ve heard other twins say over the years. Still, there is an intertwining that is deep in the soul, or at least the psyche. It’s like that of a normal sibling, but one who is also in all your classes, has the same homework, and is on your co-ed swim team.
We are not the same gender, my twin sister and I, and I think that was the reason that our relationship was extra strained throughout puberty and young-adulthood. It wasn’t just my parents that were on the receiving end of my youthful individuation. My twin sister was. In trying to become myself, I pushed her away. I don’t think it helped (maybe it did in the long term) that she and I ended up also going to the same college, and swimming on the same swim team, so we continued to be forced together by circumstances out of my control for a solid 22 years of life.
When I was younger, I felt a constant comparison to my twin sister. Laurel got an A, why didn’t you? Your sister is studying, why aren’t you? And a million variations. I felt a strong push to do better than I was doing, probably because it wasn’t hard to notice that I didn’t give much 100% effort. Or at least, I didn’t give things 100% preparation. The quote “If you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe” is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. I would spend about 30 minutes sharpening, and think to myself, I’m pretty sure that’s enough, and then swing for the fences. This strategy doesn’t get you a lot of home runs, or felled trees, but it does give you a lot of blisters.
I wonder if my parents pushed so hard about the deadlines because they saw in me some genetic time bomb of mediocrity ticking away beneath my teenage skin. Every family, theirs included, has its evolutionary dead ends, its black sheep, its branches that wither while others flourish. I imagine them lying awake at night, watching the darkness gather around my fleece while my sister's stayed pristinely white, wondering if their maternal and paternal DNA had somehow combined in me to form a perfect storm of underachievement. Maybe they thought that if they didn’t squash out that underachievement, I’d turn into a dead-beat.
My first job after college was at Wells Fargo, where I performed the kind of work that makes you question a lot. Did we really evolve opposable thumbs and language just so I could spend eight hours a day copying information from one form to another? But it was during those first months that I first glimpsed what felt like an escape hatch from the maze of corporate purgatory. One day at lunch I walked past a “creative” agency. Their logo was remenescent of a pirate flag, flying above the entrance like a call to arms. Through the huge windows I could see trendy funiture, good lighting, solid wood tables, and not a gray foamboard or pleated khaki in sight. The people inside were wearing jeans. Wait - it can be a job to be creative? This became my goal. I want to work here.
Seven years, three jobs, and countless missed deadlines later, I had finally found myself working in advertising. When I saw they were hiring for an ACD-Copywriter position, I thought to myself, woah. Maybe I can get anything I want. The first interview went great - it was one of those rare moments when I felt like I came across both qualified and cool, like when you successfully parallel park in front of a cafe full of bystanders. They asked me to come back and present some work to their CEO and creative team. I prepared my deck. The whole week I was excited.
The next week while at work at the company I was trying to leave, my phone rang. It was the hiring manager. "Where are you?" The voice asked. My stomach dropped as I checked my calendar - the one that, it turned out, hadn't synced to my phone. Fuck! The interview had started 10 minutes ago. Fuck! “I can be there in 10 minutes. I’m so sorry. It was on my other calendar.”
“No worries! Not a big deal. Don’t bother coming over. We’ll reach out.”
Of course they didn’t.
But things turned out ok. If I had gotten that job, the dominoes wouldn't have been set for me to fall into my career in magic. Sometimes the best tricks are the ones you never saw coming.
The thing about having a twin is that they are this living, breathing referendum on all your life choices. I know Laurel wouldn’t have missed the meeting. But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe it’s my unconsciousness asserting my difference from her. Twins start life feeling like one half of a whole, but grow to be different persons entirely. My sister and I aren’t identical. We are no more genetically similar than regular siblings. Yet it’s true that we share something. An intertwining. That same intertwining I've been pushing against all these years, even as it holds us together.