I'm not going to lie; if you had asked me a couple years ago if I liked being a twin, I would have told you I hated it. I hated sharing everything: birthdays, clothes, belongings. I hated getting mistaken for another person over and over. I hated being compared to her, always feeling like whatever I did was not quite up to her level. Whenever someone would say, "I wish I was a twin!" I would shake my head. "No, trust me, you don't."

My birthday was earlier this week, and I spent some time reflecting on how I, now 19 years old, felt about having another human being that shared almost all the same DNA as me. This is what I have now executively decided about having a twin.

It's the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Now I know I have never really experienced the flip side of this equation, but I have a pretty good idea based on talking to my friends and let me tell you, you guys are missing out.

What I would come to realize is that your twin is more special than a sibling in that you go through every step of life together. We experienced everything at the same time: riding a bike, moving to a new city, going to prom, graduating high school, going to college. We were in it together, and we lived out and shared our experiences with each other along the way.

Like I said before, we have had our rough patches. And believe me, we are probably going to keep having them. She is one of the most stubborn people I know, and I am probably the most hot-tempered person I know (so basically recipe for disaster), though at the end of the day we find a way to work through our issues: she realizes she is always wrong and I am always right. Ok, I kid. But our fights are never longer than a day because we know we love each other too much to fight for long.

Currently, we are a couple hundred miles away from each other, though in my mind we have never been closer. I tell her everything that is happening in my life, and her to me. She is the one I FaceTime when I am laying in bed watching Netflix when I shouldn't be watching Netflix. She is the one I share all my successes with, all my failures, and all my embarrassments. And believe me, there are A LOT of embarrassments.

People still ask me all the time what it's like to be a twin. Today, I can honestly say that having and being a twin is one of the best aspects of my life. She is my best friend, my other half, and I could not even imagine life without her.