We Contain Multitudes

As the daughter of an immigrant to the United States, I find myself often mulling over questions of identity - am I this or that? Do I need to choose? How does my heritage from both sides get passed down?

Part of what has fueled my interest in identity and the idea of ‘becoming ourselves’ stems from straddling two worlds of history, Spanish and Southern, as I make sense of them for myself. 

The most freedom has come in accepting my story for all the beauty and complexity it has offered me. And I think in part that is the best way our stories serve all of us.

On my most recent trip to my dad’s home town in Spain, my uncle stopped and turned toward me as we were walking in the plaza back to my parents’ apartment and pointed to everything around us in big sweeping motions, while calmly adding, “All of this is yours.” Rusty from being out of Spain since last summer, it took me a minute to catch up to this way of talking. 

Mine? I thought, Did we inherit something? He pointed at my chest and said, “This is your land. You are the most Spanish; I’ve always said that.” I nodded and smiled as I caught up and we turned to keep walking, familiar again with the grand and full way my family speaks. Of course the land isn’t actually mine, but I am of it and from it, he was saying it is in me. 

Days later, I stood at the bottom of a small mountain with a different uncle. He lives at the top of the windy road, his house perched, carved out really, overlooking the bay far below. We were shuttling kids and adults back down to the bottom, because the drive is too scary for most to make. 
He launched into how important it is for our children (there playing in the tiny school parking lot where we park our cars at the bottom) to know where they came from. “People get lost,” he said, “when they don’t know their roots.”

Conversations like this are not uncommon when I visit Spain. Identity and a rooted sense of place are woven into the stories, and proclamations my uncles and aunt often make.

But, for so long I wanted it to be more simple. I like clear boxes and order, and I wanted to be one or the other. I wanted to be fully Spanish or fully American. It sounded so neat and tidy when my friends said “Daddy” to their dad, while people looked at me funny when I called, “Papi!,” to mine. Papi is one of my favorite words.

I wanted to be completely Spanish. I often worried I disappointed my dad with my American-ness. I felt like I had let him down by my comfort in the US. I felt ashamed of my accent when I spoke Spanish to my cousins in Spain, worried my dad was embarrassed too. 

I wasn’t fully this or fully that, and I didn’t feel comfortable in that tension.

As I returned year after year to stay in my father’s hometown in the Northwest of Spain, I watched myself get anxious about not being Spanish enough as I arrived. Then I watched myself grieve and miss the towns and beaches of Spain that now marked my upbringing, not just my Papi’s, as I returned back to the US.

I felt torn often. 

But a parallel process was also happening: I was continuing to know and accept myself, and then finally those two roads began to meet.
I began to realize I don’t have to be anyone but myself, and if I didn’t perfectly fit in Spain, or if I didn’t perfectly fit in the United States, it didn’t matter. I was creating a new category for me.

I have found this quote very helpful:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

The freedom comes in allowing my identity to be as complex as it needs to be in order for it to be the truth. That may not be pleasing to everyone at all times; however it is still the truth, and it is still good enough. And when the worth of my identity is separate from my complexities, I am more free to explore it and accept all of it. WE ALL ARE. 

I am not fully any one thing, and I imagine neither are you. 

We find freedom to understand our stories when our worth and validation are not attached to them. 

And I wonder, and I often see in my work as a therapist, how many of us labor under false categories. You may not be a simple “this” or “that.” There may not be a box for you, and maybe… you broke the mold. 

I am not fully one thing, except for myself. Neither are you.