With autism, which so often roots itself in fear, I use this space to write about my life as it happens – the challenges, and the way they shape my emotional health and wellbeing.
My writing isn’t about finding quick answers, but about understanding what change feels like while it’s happening, and how I can learn to live more positively with it – for others too.
But losing my twin has reshaped everything I thought I knew about identity mostly and connection. Writing helps me to look at that reality directly – not to fix, because losing a twin isn't fixable, but to make sense of the loss.
For all of my life, my story was never just mine. Being a twin, your beginnings are shared, your memories overlap, and your silences feel like they belong to two people, rather than one.
When I first began to explore and delve into something I didn't know I had, I felt a certain unease – not because I felt guilty or afraid to write about something that affected me that I didn't know about, but because not everyone is happy or comfortable with what you choose to share.
The reality is, though, it isn't their story to hold or to control. We all have a right to understand ourselves, and to know what we’re living with. And even now, decades on, I'm still working myself out.
My twin never voiced her opinions voluntarily. She rarely commented on my writing at all, but I sense there was an unease there, not because I was doing anything wrong. It's my story, my life. But grief, distance and absence offer a clarity, that presence doesn't. She's okay with it. She finally understands it was only ever my story – based on my experiences, and not on hers.
Twins do not share a narrative. We are individuals in our own right. Even when we lived side by side – mirrored, mistaken for one another – we collect different versions of the same moments. Her recollections carried her private colours; as did mine, both following a different path.
We were never duplicates. We were separate. Without her, we are still separates.
But grief, strangely, untangles things. As I continue to write, after her passing, I find myself listening – not to her literal voice, but to the memory of her presence. In that softened space, something became clear: she understood there was no reason to feel threatened by my writing, or by my need to write.
I know something now I didn’t have when she was here – a softening. A quiet understanding that my story is mine to tell and to carry.
Writing about my past doesn’t betray her, or anyone. Instead, it honours the life we shared.
The realisation for her has come quickly. She knows I started writing to understand myself with an unknown disability.
Now, when I return to the page, as promised to her, I write knowing she is part of the landscape of my life, but not the subject. I write knowing that telling my story does not take anything from her.
In the end, my twin's realisation is there – she didn’t need to fear my words, and I don’t need to fear writing them. The story I tell is true, it's the story I have lived and continue to live.
And if there is a kind of grace in grief, it's that the clarity that emerges when the noise finally falls quiet, leaves only what is true.
The CP Diary basks in truth.
