Being chronically confused with another person may be humiliating, but that’s not all it is. It is also an oddly intimate experience. The boundaries between you and alter-you begin to wear down, becoming thin, even diaphanous. Their problems are your problems, their shame your shame. A doppelganger is your trail, your shadow, a bit like in the biblical story from which we derive our name, in which Ruth proclaims to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Perhaps this is why I became, increasingly, not bitter or angry about the confusion, but intensely interested.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 148