So What If I’m My Own Type?: On Carbon Copies and Discovering Oneself in Another Person
I was reading Anaïs Nin, thinking about my last relationship, and meeting a person who reminds me of myself. I was struggling with all these thoughts so I called an old friend of mine for six hours straight, and she told me she can see what I meant. So, I decided to write about it instead of texting someone I should not be texting. Whatever. I’m experimenting with these sort of confessional, medium-length, personal essays. I hope you like it.
I was reading through messages from October last year when I stumbled upon something my ex asked me during a fight:
“How would you feel if you dated a carbon copy of you?”
I remember feeling angry, almost shocked. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped, defensive.
He insisted it was just a question, but the implication stuck with me. Without thinking, I told him that, of course, I’d be happy. I’m smart, communicative, and loud about how I love. Why wouldn’t I want that? But the question clawed at me so much that I had to walk outside of my London dorm to stand in the chill autumn air. I just breathed, unsettled and bothered. A year later, I didn’t even remember he had asked me that. I screenshotted it and sent it to my best friend, “Get a load of this guy. What a fucked up thing to say.”
But it did get me thinking about a carbon copy of myself. Would I love them? There was an edge of truth in his question I wasn’t ready to face — I wasn’t so sure I liked myself back then. To consider that dating someone like me would be difficult was a truth I didn’t want to handle.
The irony is that my ex was the opposite of me. He was nonchalant, brooding, secretive — the kind of person who made you work to know him (so, the average man?). Maybe that was part of his appeal; I was drawn to someone so unlike myself, someone whose affection was quiet and reserved. Looking back, I realize that a big part of me was running from people who showed love as openly and wholeheartedly as I did. People who reminded me of myself felt intimidating because they represented a version of me I wasn’t comfortable with. Seeing someone who mirrored my own personality traits left me feeling exposed and vulnerable, almost as if they were holding up a mirror to parts of myself I hadn’t accepted yet.
A few months after our breakup, I met someone. He wasn’t new, but the meetup was. He was bright, unabashedly loud, a little cringy, and more than comfortable showing up as his full self. People were drawn to him, and he had this easy way of bonding with strangers that made everyone feel at home. The more he smiled and talked, the more I saw fragments of myself in him, or maybe more accurately, the self I’d muted. I won’t dwell on the ways I sort of “fell” for him (if you can call whatever I feel as falling.. it was more like three weeks of delusion induced crush), but I will say this: he was an echo of the person I was before I learned to dim myself down, and I found myself unexpectedly, uncomfortably fascinated.
And you know what, I get how cliché it is to say all this — that I’d have some epiphany about selfhood because of some guy my friends claim “isn’t even all that.” And honestly, they’re right. He isn’t. All that. However, epiphanies have a way of showing up regardless of how annoying it is that a guy is involved. Not to give a man credit, but there it is.
Meeting him raised a strange question: Was this attraction really just a form of narcissism? After all, he reminded me so much of myself. For a while, I found myself questioning whether this fascination was healthy or if I was just enamored by a reflection of my own personality. Society conditions us to think that self-love, or even admiration for parts of ourselves, can be selfish, almost taboo. Loving someone who reminded me of myself felt like walking a fine line between self-reflection and vanity. But gradually, I realized that this wasn’t about narcissism; it was about appreciating the parts of myself that I’d hidden. He was like a living example of my own potential, someone who embraced traits I’d filtered out or softened over the years. It wasn’t self-centeredness — it was permission to reclaim those parts of myself.
Anaïs Nin once said,
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
Nin didn’t just write about who she was; she wrote about who she could be. Her constant process of self-reinvention was both empowering and terrifying, as she danced between expressing herself fully and finding acceptance. She was drawn to people who brought out hidden parts of her, and I realize now that my attraction to this “carbon copy” wasn’t so different. Loving someone who felt like an extension of myself wasn’t narcissism; it was a glimpse of the potential for self-love, for living authentically. He embodied the parts of me that I’d censored to feel accepted, yet here he was, unabashedly himself. And as I watched him live unapologetically, I felt Nin’s words echoed in my own longing for authenticity.
And that’s the crux of it: seeing him live so unapologetically reminded me of the tension I’d always felt between authenticity and approval. I’d spent years adapting my personality, muting my quirks, and softening my opinions to be more “acceptable,” more palatable to others. Over time, I’d learned that my personality was “too much” and that shrinking myself made me easier to love. Meeting someone who lived so boldly as himself was like seeing what my own authenticity might look like, unfiltered and free of that nagging need for approval. And as much as I was drawn to it, there was also a kind of fear — the fear of seeing what it might mean to live without holding back, without always keeping others’ perceptions in mind.
Loving a carbon copy of myself isn’t about arrogance or self-infatuation. It’s about seeing, in someone else, the reflection of who I could have been if I hadn’t learned to dim. And maybe that’s what self-love looks like — recognizing that we’re worth showing up for fully without apology or restraint. Meeting him wasn’t just a mirror; it was an invitation to take those parts of myself out of hiding, to love my own intensity enough to embody it again.
And even though my friend says she can see where I’m coming from about all these, I realize that a lot of these are made up in my head. However, I’m trying to learn that instead of dismissing my experiences as delusions; I’m instead going to take the thesis of the feeling and write about it. That’s one way I can move forward. In the end, the question my ex asked me wasn’t so far off the mark. I’m learning that maybe loving a carbon copy of myself isn’t the challenge.
The real challenge is loving the person I am, just as I am, without the need to quiet down.
