We are trained to think that in order to understand someone and accept someone, we have to ensure that who they are is easily comprehensible to us. We tend to respond to that which we already know, so when we interact with others it’s comfortable for us to place them into a familiar ‘box’. We look for indicators that have been implanted in us as a result of social conditioning, that will help us understand who a person is.

Sometimes it’s as easy as, they’re a woman so they’ll probably be like this or they’re a man so they’ll probably be like this. Other times we want to unpack what people do for a living. What are they wearing? Are they dressed like this because they take themselves too seriously? Or maybe they’re wearing that because they don’t. I’ve never heard of that name, they must be foreign. Do they speak english? Oh they have an accent? I bet I can guess where they’re from.

I am someone that is on the receiving end of excessive 'identity interrogation' because almost everyone I meet struggles with my name, and is searching for a familiar box to try to put me into so they can figure out how to continue talking to me. And I know this because when I tell them my name, they follow up with,

“Sorry what was that? Do you have a nickname or something? I’m definitely going to forget that”.

This has happened so often that I started showing up as an ‘easier’ version of myself so that another person would feel more comfortable during our introduction. I adopted a nickname that I never liked to make myself more familiar to other people. I would wish my name rhymed with something so that I could finally get people to pronounce my name correctly. There was a time where I even stopped correcting people that mispronounced my name because somehow, when you’ve internalized that you have to show up as ‘easy to interpret’ you also lose the courage to assert who you really are because it’s just easier. When people get the most fundamental part of your identity wrong, it makes you feel small, unimportant, and like an outsider.

Then would come the question I dreaded, “I’ve never heard that name before, where are you from?”

The truth is, I don’t even know how to answer this question because I have never truly felt like I belong anywhere. My family is from one place, I was born in another, and I grew up in another. I cannot call one place ‘my home’ with conviction because I am both fragments of each place combined, yet not enough of one place. And, again, people struggle to find a way to synthesize all these differences, so they scramble and reach for the closest stereotype to better identify me.

Living at the intersection of different cultures is both polarizing and overwhelming. You’re not this, but you’re also not that, so what are you? We are so confined by this narrative that we are where we come from, and we must exist in a way that can be defined on paper. Our identity often becomes linked to how others identify us and whether they have been able to justify our existence in their mind. If we stopped thinking of the answer to this question as not intrinsically connected to our identity, we would find that in-fact, we are all from the same place. I am from my mother’s womb, why? Did you come from somewhere else? But again, we seek to exist within social streams that we already know, and by doing this, we reduce people and all of what makes them them, to fit them into our own frame of reference. Only recently did I realize that there is a unique power in re-defining yourself beyond the stereotypes of culture or ethnicity. I’ve learned that there is something remarkable about having a name that requires people to look beyond the scope of what they know. It’s not a burden, it’s an opportunity for me to show up as the authentic me, and own that. Our identities should be something we create with what’s given to us. We are the sum of all that we are, and we are who we choose to become, regardless of all the boxes out there.