So, I have a twin sister named Al, which is one of the coolest things about me, and I love being a twin. We all get like the silly twin power, things like thinking about the same random things we haven’t talked about or knowing when something is wrong with the other. But there’s also not very fun things about being a twin. And the main thing that I tell everyone is that having a twin is like staring at the worst parts of yourself. The best parts of ourselves, I think, are all our own, but we have mostly the same faults.

So that’s all to say that we fought like near constantly when we were kids. My mom’s main approach to handling this was to separate us. When I was younger, I hated this a lot. I didn’t like being separated from Al, even though we had just been fighting, I just didn’t want to be away from her, and I also didn’t like the impending doom of whatever my mom was about to say to me.

Every time I think she would just like to sit us down and ask us for our side of the story, and probably say, “You need to be nicer to your sister.” But now I appreciate it a lot, just because having time alone to think about the situation calmly was ultimately really helpful then and now. Learning to do that myself and separate myself in bad situations has been really helpful for how I deal with stress. I don’t think I want to be a parent, but if I ever were one, I think I would use this method, but I’d probably also kind of explain that reasoning to my kid to kind of like dissipate some of that anxiety.