It started in my comments three weeks ago. One person said it. Then another. Then about forty-seven others in the same thread, and suddenly my TikTok notifications were just a wall of variations on the same sentence: "has anyone told you that you look EXACTLY like..."
The "my look alike" trend has been massive on TikTok lately, people filming themselves, finding their supposed twin, reacting to the side-by-side. Some of these are uncanny. Some are a reach so generous you'd think they were nominated for a humanitarian award. I've been watching them roll through my feed and finally I gave in and did my own version, and it broke my brain a little.
Not because of the doppelganger situation itself (though that is genuinely weird, and I'll get to it) but because the whole exercise made me think harder about identity than I expected. What we look like versus who we are. Why we're so drawn to finding our double. What it means when strangers look at your face and the first thing they want to do is find its copy somewhere else.
The "That One Singer" Problem
First let me address the most common comparison I get, because it keeps showing up and I need to put it somewhere official. People in my comments constantly tell me I look like "that one singer." And depending on who's commenting, "that one singer" is apparently three different people. I get a red-haired actress, a European singer-songwriter, and (this one is specifically hilarious) a very famous person who I do not look like in any meaningful way but who my grandmother would probably also mention if I showed her a photo of myself.
Here is what I've learned from being told who I look like for thirty-two years: the comparison says more about the person making it than the face being observed. When you look at someone and immediately try to map them onto an existing reference point, you're revealing your own visual catalog. You're saying: this is the file I have that most closely matches what I'm seeing. The face in front of you becomes a variation on a template you already know.
Which is fascinating and also slightly dehumanizing? Like, cool, I'm a remix of someone else in your brain. Thanks. That's very comforting.
what I actually found
So I did the TikTok thing. I found photos of the people I get compared to most often and did the side-by-side. And here's my honest reaction: in some of them, I can see it. The jaw, maybe. The way certain expressions land. In others, I think the comparison is entirely about the red hair and tattoos, which is a vibe, not a face. "She has tattoos and colored hair therefore she looks like the other woman with tattoos and colored hair" is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a logic chain.
But then someone commented something that stuck with me. They said: "the look-alike thing isn't really about faces. it's about energy. you two have the same energy." And I sat with that for a minute. Because what does that mean, exactly? What is "energy" in a visual sense? It's probably posture, the way you hold your shoulders, what your face does when you're in repose versus when you're animated. The specific cocktail of "this is the self I have constructed and this is how it sits in my body."
And that, to me, is way more interesting than shared bone structure.
Identity Is Assembled, Not Inherited
I grew up in a church culture that had very specific ideas about identity. Who you were was given to you, by God, by your family, by your community. You were a daughter of the church, a member of the body, a role before you were a person. The language around self was always about stewardship of something you'd been handed, not construction of something you were building.
It took me a long time to understand that my face was mine. That the way I dress and the way I do my hair and the tattoos that now cover a significant portion of my body, these are not rebellion against something, exactly. They're construction. The ongoing process of making an outside that matches an inside that I've been figuring out for thirty-two years and will probably be figuring out for thirty-two more.
When people do the look-alike trend, they're playing with the idea that identity is a type, that there's a category you belong to, a template you came from. And it's fun! It's genuinely fun and I'm not trying to make it heavy. But I notice the way it pulls at something in me. The small, quiet resistance I feel to being categorized as a version of someone else.
I am the first version of me. The look-alike is a coincidence of genetics or vibe or red hair dye, and that's interesting but it's not defining.
the weird gift of a stranger's face
Here's where it gets genuinely strange. A few days after I posted my look-alike TikTok, someone sent me a DM with a photo of a girl they'd found. Not a celebrity, just a person, a random human woman living somewhere, who had apparently gone viral in a small corner of TikTok because people kept tagging her in videos saying she looked like me.
She had red hair. She had tattoos on her forearms. She was playing guitar in the photo, which is either a coincidence or the universe being a little too on the nose.
I stared at that photo for a long time. We don't actually look that alike, different faces, different builds, but the gestalt of it was close enough that I understood why people were making the connection. And I felt this very specific emotion that I don't have a great word for. Something between "oh, hello" and "wait, which one of us is the copy."
Which is absurd, obviously. Neither of us is a copy of anything. We're both originals who happen to have landed on similar aesthetic coordinates from different directions. She probably built her look for her own reasons, the same way I built mine. The convergence is a coincidence. The resemblance is a surface.
But I thought about her for the rest of the day, this stranger with her guitar and her tattoos, walking around somewhere as a person that apparently echoes me visually. I hope she's got good things going on. I hope she's recording something, if she plays guitar. I hope nobody spends too much time telling her she looks like somebody else.
what the trend is actually about
The "my look alike" trend is huge right now and I think it's huge for a reason worth saying plainly: people want to be mirrored. We want someone to see us and say you exist, I have evidence that you exist, here is your reflection. It's why the doppelganger myth has been around for thousands of years. Why identical twins fascinate us. Why we get excited when we see our own name on a coffee cup.
There is something deeply satisfying about being recognized. Not as famous or interesting, just as a distinct pattern that exists in the world. Your face is a fact. Your look-alike is proof that the fact is legible.
I think that's what's driving the trend, underneath the fun and the side-by-sides and the "omg you could be twins" comments. We're all just trying to establish that we're real. That our particular shape of being is real and recognizable and findable in the world.
And hey, if you find your look-alike, embrace it. Not because your twin is you, but because the fact that you're distinctive enough to have a double is pretty wild when you think about it. Eight billion people and somehow two of you ended up at the same coordinates. That's either statistics or poetry and I'm choosing to call it poetry this week.
Now someone please tell me definitively who I actually look like because the three-way split in my comments is driving me genuinely insane. Leave your vote below. I need a verdict. I need to know which file I live in inside your brain. I'm asking for purely scientific reasons and absolutely not because I'll think about it for the rest of the month.
Okay fine. I'll think about it for the rest of the month.
on being mistaken for someone else
I want to tell you about the first time someone was genuinely convinced I was a different person. Not just "you look like so-and-so" but literally stopped me on the street, grabbed my arm, said the name of someone they knew with complete confidence in their eyes. It was at a gas station outside my hometown, I was nineteen, and the woman who grabbed my arm was a stranger who apparently had a niece she hadn't seen in a couple of years. She was so sure. Her face was lit up with this absolute certainty and I didn't have the heart to dismantle it immediately. I just stood there for a second in the grip of a mistaken identity.
When I told her I wasn't who she thought I was, the light in her face went out like a switch. Not rudely, she apologized, laughed it off, but I saw the tiny grief of it. She had the person she was looking for right in front of her for about four seconds, and then she didn't. I thought about that for a long time afterward. What it means to project a face you love onto a stranger's face. What it means to want someone to be present so much that you find them in the wrong body.
That's a bit darker than the TikTok trend, I know. But it's where my brain goes. The doppelganger thing isn't just fun and aesthetic, it touches something about how we see each other, how we need to see each other. We are all, on some level, looking for faces we recognize. Faces that mean something. When we find one that almost fits, something in us reaches toward it.
I find that sad and beautiful in equal measure. I find a lot of things sad and beautiful in equal measure lately, it's a recording-at-2am kind of season if I'm being honest. Everything feels more porous. I'm writing songs that crack me open and then I'm trying to sleep and instead I'm on my phone watching look-alike TikToks at half-past midnight. The usual.
If you've ever been mistaken for someone else, really, not just a passing "oh you look like" but an actual solid case of wrong-person, I want to hear about it. Because I think those moments teach you something about the gap between what you look like and what you are. About how little the face and the self actually have to do with each other, even though we act like they're the same thing constantly.
And if you're the person walking around out there with the guitar and the red hair and the forearm tattoos who got tagged in my comments: genuinely, hi. I hope the music is going well. I hope your week is good. We apparently share some coordinates in the world's visual vocabulary and I think that's kind of beautiful. I wish you nothing but good recording sessions and pothos plants that actually thrive without you having to apologize to them daily.