i think i’ve seen you before: the echo theory

why we’re drawn to people who remind us of someone

found on pinterest

someone once told me i looked like their roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s younger sister. he said it with the kind of certainty usually reserved for things like blood types or the best slice of pizza in town.

“you’ve got the same glasses,” he said, scrolling through his gallery. “and i swear the exact same tooth gap.”

i laughed. “i promise you, i look nothing like her.”

but he smiled, like he didn’t totally believe me. he was sure he knew me from somewhere, and didn’t want to let that go. like he was holding onto a memory, trying to pin down a face that felt just familiar enough to matter. those moments when you glimpse someone in a crowd and your brain reaches for a name you can’t quite find.

people tell me i remind them of someone all the time. a friend. a sister. a stranger from their building. a character in a film. once, someone even said i looked like alia bhatt. i think i was out shopping with my mum and my cousin. i swear i floated on it for days. i didn’t really see it though. but i took the compliment anyway.

i never see it. but they do — and somehow that makes them like me more. i think that’s kind of beautiful. like we’re just looking for ourselves in everyone else. like we’re trying to stitch the world together with echoes.

and lately, i’ve been noticing just how often we do that — look for comfort in faces that echo someone familiar. how we soften at the hint of recognition. how we reach for the known in the blur of the new.

maybe that’s why i can’t stop thinking about those celebrity look-alike contests — the way they take that instinct and put it on display. our collective obsession with resemblance, made public. made theatrical.

i think we’ve all seen the videos: crowds cheering in parks or bars or city squares, dressed like paul mescal or timothée chalamet — short shorts, skinny scarves and all. in that moment, people want to believe. they light up at the sight of someone who looks like someone they already love. it’s not really about fooling anyone. these aren’t impersonators, not exactly. they’re just… people. everyday faces who happen to resemble someone famous. someone beloved.

some might call it mimicry. borrowed light. unoriginal. but i think it’s something deeper than that. because it’s not just about the face. it’s about the need to be seen. to feel like you matter because you remind someone of someone they already care about. to find comfort in something familiar when the world feels so fragmented and strange.

that’s what i keep coming back to. it’s not the celebrity we’re drawn to. it’s the recognition. a flicker of memory. a piece of ourselves, refracted in someone else’s face.

we’re always searching for someone we already know.

and we do this all the time. with strangers. with friends. with people we fall in love with. even with characters on a screen.

i’ll be watching a movie and swear i’ve seen that actress before. i pause, google her — no, i haven’t. but she just looks almost like someone else. same eyes. same voice cadence. same posture. and when i figure it out, something relaxes in me. like my brain’s been trying to finish a sentence, and finally finds the word.

there’s something so human about it — the instinct to trace the present onto the past. this happens so often it’s practically a ritual, a memory-matching game my brain plays on loop. it’s a strange kind of relief, that moment of recognition. like finally finding the missing puzzle piece, even if it doesn’t quite fit.

i think that’s what gets me. how fast the heart can recognize something the mind can’t place. how we meet someone and feel like we’ve known them forever, even when we’ve just learned their name. it’s not always logical. sometimes it’s just a feeling you follow, without quite knowing why.

maybe that’s the real question here: why do we do this? maybe it’s nostalgia. or survival. or just the mind clinging to what it already knows.

found on pinterest

maybe that’s why we fall for the people who carry echoes of old friends or our younger selves. maybe the heart is just playing favourites with what it recognizes. maybe that’s what love is, half the time. not discovery, but recognition.

sometimes, the feeling arrives before the facts do. someone walks into our lives and slips into a story we’ve already been carrying. we don’t just see who they are, but we’re reminded of who we were. or who we’re still becoming.

it’s like we walk through the world with quiet maps tucked in our pockets — outlines of who we believe we are, shaped by memories, hopes, and fears. when someone traces a familiar line on that map, we feel it. something stirs inside. we lean closer. we call it chemistry, or maybe even resonance. like they belong in the world we’ve already built in our heads.

in psychology, we call those quiet maps self-schemas. they’re like internal blueprints we use to understand ourselves — and the ones who feel familiar. and when love takes hold, those blueprints expand. our sense of self stretches to make room for them, folding around another’s shape until it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

maybe that’s why some people feel like home right away. because we’re not meeting them for the first time. we’re just recognizing the version of ourselves they were already holding.

and maybe that’s also part of why the idea of doppelgängers feels so uncanny to us. because they remind us that we’re not as original or singular as we thought. maybe we’re just fragments of each other, reflections passed down like heirlooms.

but maybe being a “copy” isn’t a bad thing. maybe it just means we’re part of something bigger. that we’re all pieces of a family, scattered across the world — cousins, soul twins, look-alikes — connected by the echoes we carry.

we’ve always done this — searched for what we know in the faces around us. babies are barely born before someone starts saying “he’s got his father’s nose,” or “she’s got her mother’s eyes.” we play connect-the-dots with faces, tracing resemblance like a secret code. as if it’ll tell us something. like we can find meaning in the matching.

there’s this old tumblr post i saved ages ago — it’s lived rent-free in my head ever since. i don’t know who wrote it, but it puts something i’ve always felt into words better than i ever could.

i come back to it often — especially on the days when i don’t feel particularly proud of the way i move through the world. because it makes me wonder: if we really hated ourselves as much as we say we do, why do we keep finding comfort in people who remind us of us?

and maybe we do hate ourselves — in quiet, complicated ways. in the mirror. in the hesitation before speaking. in the silence afterward. in the way we overthink every text, every pause, every moment we said too much or not enough.

but even then, we’re drawn to the people who sound like us. who laugh at the same things as we do. who spiral over the same questions. people who collect the same niche obsessions and carry the same invisible weight. they feel familiar because they move through the world in a way we understand. and maybe that’s it. maybe we’re just looking for someone who makes us feel a little less strange for being the way we are.

there’s this line often attributed to kant — though it’s more paraphrase than quote — and it goes:

“we do not see things as they are. we see things as we are.”

read that again. let it sit.

because that’s it, isn’t it? that’s the whole thesis. the heart of it.

we don’t just witness the world — we filter it through everything we’ve lived. we look through ourselves. through what we’ve felt. what we’ve lost. what we’ve been waiting for. we make every song a little bit about us. every film, a reflection. we take what isn’t ours and hold it close anyway, because it feels familiar. like it was written by someone who’s been inside our head.

so when we meet someone who feels familiar — someone who laughs like we do, or sees the world in a way that makes us feel less alone — it’s not really about them. not at first. it’s about what they awaken. what they remind us of. what they make us believe is still possible.

we fall in love with people who reflect something back at us. not in a self-absorbed way. in a recognition way. like: oh. you have that same ache, too? you carry it differently, but i know it when i see it.

but recognition isn’t always comfortable. sometimes it’s unsettling. like a mirror held up too close.

i have a friend in toronto who reminds me of my friends from school, but i can never explain exactly why. it’s not her face or voice. i think it’s the way we laugh at the same dumb things. the first time we hung out, we spent two hours in one store, cracking the same kinds of jokes i used to make back home. we had an entire market to explore, but we never made it past that one place. we only left because it was closing.

that night, i called my old friends and told them all about her. because she made me miss them. she’s her own person, completely. but something about her feels stitched to a memory. like my heart already knew her shape before my mind caught up.

maybe that’s what we’re always doing. finding pieces of home in people we haven’t met yet.

there’s a korean idea called in-yun. it’s the belief that if you brush shoulders with someone on the street, it means you’ve shared thousands of lifetimes before. i like the thought of it. and it’s not the only version of that feeling. in some indigenous traditions, there’s a sense of ancestral memory — the idea that we carry echoes of people we’ve never met, that our bones remember. the french call it déjà vu.

maybe these moments aren’t just coincidence. maybe they’re reminders. maybe recognition isn’t about the past or the future, but about something deep and quiet in us being answered.

so when someone says you remind them of someone they know — even if you don’t see it — take it as a gift. a quiet kind of compliment. we’re all just trying to feel a little less alone.

and maybe that’s the echo theory in motion: the way we see pieces of ourselves in others, and for a moment, feel held by the familiar.

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🎧 this week’s soundtrack

the song that lives in these words

from eden was rattling around in my brain the whole time i was writing this or even when i was thinking about it. i couldn’t shake it. i think it lives in the same emotional territory — that strange pull toward someone who feels familiar in a way you can’t quite explain. there’s this one lyric that lodged itself in me:

“honey you’re familiar, like my mirror, years ago.”

and i just kept thinking, yes. that’s it. that’s the echo theory in a single line. not recognition in the obvious sense, but something softer, more slippery — like memory, or longing, or a version of yourself you haven’t seen in a while.

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thank you for being here.

whether you meant to arrive or just wandered in through some strange hallway of the internet — i’m grateful you made it to my little corner. it’s a strange thing, to share thoughts into the void and have someone, somehow, receive them. i don’t take it lightly.

typing…still runs on feelings, pop culture spirals, and the generosity of those who believe that overthinking is, actually, an art form worth supporting. simply knowing you’re here, reading what i wrote, feels like its own kind of magic.

if this made you feel something (or at least tilt your head and go hmm), you might consider one of these small joys:

🥐 send a croissant my way — a small, one-time gesture to help keep this soft, chaotic little lighthouse lit.

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no pressure. truly. but if you’ve ever read something here and thought “she should spiral for a living”… then know this: your presence alone brings that dream a little closer to reality. and that’s no small thing.

with unreasonable amounts of affection,

anshika ✨