Personal Narrative Essay On Personal Identity

One of my favorite tv show character, Rachel Green, said once, “It’s like all my life everybody has told me, ‘You’re a shoe! You’re a shoe! You’re a shoe!’ and then today I just stopped and I said, ‘But what if I don’t want to be a shoe? What if I want to be a purse, you know? Or a hat?’”. I did not add this quote in just to make this longer, but because when I thought of some of my identities, I realized that some of them weren’t me. Some of the things I “identified” with, I didn’t identify with. Like for example, my religion.
All my life I have been told I was catholic. I was born into a catholic family so many assumed that I, myself, was catholic. If you ask me, and not my mother, you would now that I am not religious at all. I was told

that those people are called atheists and agnostics, but I am not ready to label myself with that right now. My religion in my identity is marked N/A for now. Another thing that I also realized that people assumed of me was my sexual orientation.
A lot of people think, “Well she’s a girl, she must like boys, right?” I am not saying that I don’t like boys, I am just saying that I don’t know. You can’t know something of myself that I, in this moment, am confused about/don’t know yet, right? I like girls, I like boys, I like people in general. I, in this moment, identify myself as a queer meaning that I feel like I don’t fit in any of the LGBT/heterosexual categories. Speaking of categories, many people seem to think that I am not “mexican enough” because I don’t fit in most of the categories they create about how a mexican person “really” is.
I was born in the United States, which doesn’t make me less mexican.

The language I speak the best is English, still doesn’t make me less mexican. I just very much dislike how people pick up this idea of the things we are suppose to like or how we should act and look. Just because I don’t meet your “standards” doesn’t make me less of who I am. I was born into a mexican family, I lived surrounded in our cultural, and it runs in my blood. Calling me “white washed” won’t change that. I am proud of being mexican just as much as I am proud to be female.
Identifying as female has taught me lots of things. It taught me all the things we are expected to know and how we are expected to act. It has taught me that in most situations we aren’t seen as human, we are seen as objects. Not everything is negative though, it feels good to be rebellious against people's expectations, it gives you a feeling of confidence and freedom. Being female, to me, is the biggest part of my identity because it is the only one of my identities that I portray and you can see by just looking at me by how feminine I am.
All of my identities play a big part of who I am as a person and I feel like you cannot guess most of the by just looking at me, you have to dig deeper. Sometimes you cannot get all the information by just observing someone and sometimes you need to ask questions instead of assuming. In the end, never forget that you have options, you are the only one who can choose who you want to be and how you identify

yourself.