On: Not Being "Over It"...

Gut-wrenching aloneness. A hole through one’s soul. Almost crippling emptiness. Something unexplainable missing. These are some descriptions of what it feels like to have lost a twin (or multiple) in the womb or at birth – no matter how early the loss or how “full” a survivor’s life seems to be. Most people think that if a surviving twin lost a twin early that 1) they won’t be affected (certainly not as affected as later-loss twinless); and that 2) they should be over it by now. The truth is that they will never be “over it” because it is who they are. They can heal and move on, but they cannot simply erase their wombstory - in the same sense that a divorced person cannot pretend they were never married because they are now single again – only on a much deeper, cellular level, because it is in their wiring. To discount their twin nature would be to discount themselves. To pretend it didn’t happen or that someone whose dna is your dna didn’t exist, is to not exist. This is why early womb loss is so complex and difficult to heal and why it is different from twin loss.