My twin sister and I parted ways for college after spending our entire lives together. The experience changed the way we socialize for the better.

• I spent my entire life with my twin sister before we parted ways for college in 2014.
• The experience helped us to become more confident in our own social skills.

This past weekend, my identical twin sister and I attended a mutual friend's engagement party.

We have known this friend since we were 14. Now we're 27, the party marked the first time in a while that my sister and I had been in a room together with a group of friends from high school.

The experience helped me to reflect on how different our social lives are now.

While we've remained close with some of our childhood friends — my sister and I are both going to be bridesmaids at our friend's upcoming nuptials — we are also a lot more independent than we ever were as teenagers, which I credit to our wildly different college experiences.

My sister and I parted ways for college after spending years stuck together

It wasn't unusual to be a twin at our high school in Glasgow, Scotland, while growing up. There were five sets of twins in our year group alone, and each of them had different relationships.

Some of the twins we knew had the same friends and were in the same classes. Others wanted nothing to do with each other.

One of the sets of twins, two girls, ended up going to the same university and even took the same course.

My sister and I were inseparable during school. We shared a tight-knit friend group, but, for the most part, we were both a little reserved when it came to meeting new people.

And although we were close, we knew going to the same college wasn't in the cards for us. It wasn't even a conversation. Our interests were mismatched — I wanted to be a writer, while she wanted to be a dancer. And besides, we were looking forward to branching out and carving our own lives.

My twin was accepted to dance college in 2013, a year before our senior year of high school (students can legally graduate from high school at the age of 16 in Scotland).

Spending the final year alone helped me get used to her not being around, but her presence was still prominent. For example, I remember a classmate accidentally calling me by her name on my final day of school, despite the fact she had been gone for so long. The person who got us mixed up either hadn't bothered to memorize which one of us was still at school, or they didn't care.

I went on to study English, journalism, and creative writing at a local university for free in 2014. It took me a while to make friends, but when I did the feeling was liberating. At first, it was strange to have people in my life who knew me as an individual, rather than a twin. It was odd to know there were people who loved me who hadn't even met my sister, and I'm sure she felt the same way.

Our university experiences were completely different. While I spent my days in lecture halls and writing essays, my sister's life revolved around a dance studio with mirrors on every wall. Her experience was physically and mentally grueling, and the characters she befriended loved being the center of attention.

Meanwhile, my friends shared my love for books and writing. None of them knew the first thing about dance.

Over the years, we have continued to make new friends without each other. I have now met most of my sister's friends from her college days, but there are many people in her life that I haven't been introduced to. And that's okay.

As time went on, I found that the experience helped us both become more confident in our social skills, and now neither of us are afraid to start a conversation with a stranger. For me personally, it's also liberating that I can now frequently travel solo, go to the movies alone, and dine without a companion after years of being part of a pair.

In school, I didn't have to try that hard in social situations because I had my twin to lean on. But I've learned, in the real world, you have to be able to rely on yourself.