A story where truth is stranger than fiction

Since starting to think about unexpected identity loss a few years ago I hadn’t yet thought about twins and what happens when they’re separated.

In my book I have an adoptee’s story. It’s pretty easy to think about identity loss under those circumstances.

That’s the closest similarity to the story I heard last night on a Netflix documentary — dealing with unanswerable questions about the life that could have been…

I’ll need to watch the documentary quite a few more times to actually get the story straight because:

1. It is mind blowing and mind boggling

and

1. It’s really complicated trying to keep up with who is who throughout the film.

This is because it’s a story about two sets of identical twins that get mixed up in the hospital and both sets lose one sibling to the other family.

The documentary is shot nine years after Jorge, Carlos, William, and Wilber meet each other, so lots of time to assimilate reality.

They met because of … a trip to a butcher’s shop in Bogotá, Colombia!

And if you have any idea of the size of Bogotá, you’ll know the likelihood of what happened happening is basically zero!

As you can imagine, the impact on their identities, when they were 25 and found out they had identical twins in their respective families, was monumental.

You’ll have to watch the movie yourself — The Accidental Twins — to get the full story.

But the most amazing thing discovered is something researchers have never been able to measure because of ethical constraints — the nature vs nurture question.

• It turns out that while environment, opportunity, and many other factors play huge roles in a person’s identity and destiny, genetics plays a bigger role than previously thought.

These young men grew up in dramatically different environments.

One in the urban concrete jungle that is Bogotá, Colombia.

The other high in the mountains on a farm in Santander Province, 14 hours away by bus from Bogotá, with no electricity, running water, and whose school was an hour away.

• But when they reunited and got to know each other, each set of twins’ personalities, mannerisms, tastes, physicality, and even aspirations were exceptionally similar.

So although they had forced identity transitions up the yin yang, they remained the same at their cores.

—Julie