Twins! …because I am one!
(5-minute read)
By Estelle Olivares
Trained Dancer, Certified Fitness Nutrition Expert, Lifelong Vitamin/Herb Nerd, Wellness Coach.
Hello, beautiful humans!
I was going to start my new blog with the topic of my lifelong study of wellness, but I am going to save that for the another installment. I must start with a more personal story about me and my identical twin sister, Celeste.
Why, you ask?
For one thing, without her, I’m not sure my new Health for Dance platform would have actually come to fruition.
Maybe?
But it would have taken me a much much longer amount of time to accomplish what she and I have been able to do together.
You might be wondering why this is important and what the heck it has to do with your health?
Well you see….
…the value of twins in this world is of huge importance to scientists who study epigenetics and biology. Twins, particularly identical twins, such as myself and Celeste, can offer the rest of the world (of singletons – that’s most of you) valuable insights about our bodies, individually and collectively. Let’s go!
Celeste and I share a very special bond.
From the time we were babies (and to help everyone stay sane) our family kept us on the same schedule for sleep/wake/food. This intensified our bond and we were perfectly pleased to be together. Even though we had separate cribs we would stand up and shake the cribs together and climb into each other’s crib so that we could be together.
We had spent nine months spooning after all,.
As littles, we were each other’s best friends, our playmates, study partners and rivals (a little bit, but always making up because we love each other). We attribute this closeness to our parents’ good insights to treat us as individuals despite our sameness.
Dad never really could tell us apart (at first glance, anyway; bless his sweet and loving, ever patient soul), but Mom and big sis and big brother could/can always tell us apart. Even though we were often dressed in the same style dress/outfit, we would be dressed in different colors, or given different colored ribbons in our hair to help people tell us apart. Celeste was red or yellow and I was blue or pink.
Now you have a clue as to who’s who in this photo… ;)
I promise I will get to some health stuff, I will. But come on….you know you love the twin stories! Who doesn’t?
As young adults we migrated to Oregon – first me and then I “convinced” Celeste to join me about a year later. It didn’t take much, and she felt home as soon as she landed. Over the past 25+ years in Oregon, we have lived together many times, sometimes with our respective partners, and now we own our home together in Astoria where we built a small, lovely Argentine Tango Community here on the edge of the world.
Let’s save the fun topic of dance for future writings! ;)
There are several instances in our lives where this topic of twindom is fascinating and yes, even for us as twins. It wasn’t until very recently, on my own unending health quest that I was able to understand why certain things affected us differently. I’d like to share some stories with you:
Story A. Celeste always got mauled with mosquito bites from very young to early adulthood, yet I would have nary a one and it certainly didn’t bother me the way she seemed so afflicted. She has now overcome this and we talk about it sometimes. She obsessively loved the feeling of scratching those bug bite itches; I couldn’t have cared less. You could say that her histamine reaction was stronger than mine, yet we had no ‘allergies’.
Story B. Later in life I became slightly allergic to almond skins. I never really considered it an allergy because I could eat almonds with skins every now and then but if I ate them too often, they would bother my throat. I could eat almonds without skins all day long (well, I don’t know if that’s true but you get the euphemism), and no other nut bothered me the way almond skins did. I did an allergy test one time and no nuts showed up. (Then I learned about the nature of tests and…that’s a story for another time.) Then I learned about associated traumas with foods and I healed myself of this reaction with some very specific awareness and presence around this specific food. I no longer have this reaction to almond skins, which is really great because I love almonds!
Sidebar: Celeste also no longer gets bug bites the way she used to. She decided she no longer wanted to show herself to the world with welts and so she overcame the need to scratch the itch, literally. Both instances are examples of how we can decide to take charge of our health and our bodies. Usually, it does require some special sort of meditation/presence/awareness with our mind, the connection to our body, and the way we connect to the world as well.
This is one of the ways I help people now: To overcome food allergies, or at least understand how to get to the root of the problem and work on resolving any reactions that keep recurring.
Story C. Celeste had chicken pox when we were little, and Mom made me sit with her in bed for at least a week, maybe longer, for as long as she had symptoms; I never got them. I was never afraid of getting them. I was happy to keep my Teetee company while the rest of our world was afraid (‘Teetee’ is one of our twinisms; we could not say ‘twin sister’ when we were little, so we called each other TeeTee; this has morphed over the years to other variations, like ‘Teeters’. I could go on and on about our idioglossia…perhaps another time…).
Whatever the reason Celeste expressed chicken pox was, I did not have the same external trigger. Of course, I was not afraid of her, but simply accepted my fate to sit next to her (let’s face it, I obviously like sitting next to my Teetee!), keep her company, maybe come down with the same thing….maybe because of my acceptance mindset, I never ‘got’ the chicken pox?
This brings me to another discussion to have here: the one about my greater understanding of this ‘disease’ and why it can be so life-threatening for babies and for elders, but that is also for another session.
Story D. When we ate hard eggs – Mom would slice them up using an egg slicer – I would eat some of the white, but mostly I loved the yolks; Celeste was the opposite, and we would often trade each other for the parts that the other loved more. This story is more amusing than anything poignant, although we used to joke – we still do, actually – that Celeste “stole all the food” (in the womb); but then why would I like the yolk more? This is the more nutritionally dense aspect of an egg. I definitely have always loved liver- and eye-healthy foods: egg yolks and blueberries are two of my most favorite. Plus, egg yolks look like little planets when they are hard cooked and I loved looking at them in that way – a reminder of our alien nature? Probably. (We have been told by two or three separate psychics, on separate occasions, that we are from another planet/realm/galaxy – aren’t we all?? They were always super serious about it; we were like, cool, that explains some things…and off we would go in our little insular world.) These days, I prefer a runny yolk or if I eat hard eggs, I like to halve them or quarter them for salting and for easier eating. I value the protein aspect of the whole egg more than I did when I was little and I definitely prefer the taste of the egg white WITH the yolk so it’s been a long while since I looked at the planetary nature of my egg yolks but it is fun to think about.
Story E. We were both trained right-handed, but I learned recently that handedness is determined at the moment of the first cell division as the human species develops. Therefore, in identical twins, because this is a fluke within the human species that is determined at the first cell division, one twin is always biologically right-handed and one is biologically left-handed even if both are trained to use the right. Celeste and I both had an ah-ha! moment when we learned this because Celeste can do things with her left side much easier than I can. I found a baby picture of one of us – it’s really hard to tell when we are little – soon after this realization, and then I noticed the little was eating with her left hand! I texted Celeste the picture and said…Guess how I know this is you! She texted back, Left hand!!!
Celeste keeps this picture on her mirror as her reminder to love her inner child and talk to herself lovingly and with the kindness and unconditional love all children deserve – it is the gift our parents gave to us with the most grace and ease and one for which we are endlessly grateful because it ripples out and allows us to share the love they bestowed upon and within us.
I hope this has been entertaining and maybe a little bit insightful about some of the ideas I use with my clients. My twin is of course my second guinea pig (me being the first guinea pig, always), so I’ve been able to ‘practice’ different ideas with my family over the years to see what works on this quest to be well and to ideally stay out of the hospital. Certainly, knowing when to seek professional help is part of this awareness.
There is much we can do to empower ourselves to better health and I am so excited to share more of these ideas as time marches on, the way it does. Hopefully you can learn how to implement some or all, of these ideas in order to stay not just well, but joyous in life! Remaining in joy is what keeps us well and allows us to bounce back more quickly when we do need time to heal.
Awareness of fear and the ability to downgrade that fear quickly improves your chances of survival more robustly and the amount of time you need to heal will be dramatically shorter.
This is just a taste of what I have learned. I hope you stick around to learn more. Mostly because I want to help you live your most joyous life!
From this alien-oriented twin living in a human body, to all you other beautiful human aberrations,
With joy and much love,
Estelle*
