When I looked up the meaning of the word identity on the internet, I wanted to know its etymology, and why this word, which for me had always meant what makes you different, was so ironically close in spelling and yet so far in meaning from the word identical. Identity comes from the Latin identitas, meaning sameness or oneness, built from idem, "the same". The same roots of "identical". The word appeared in the English language in the early 17th century, still carrying its original meaning of sameness. It was only after, over hundreds of years, that it drifted into something closer to its opposite, as the unique set of traits and experiences that make a person who they are. Identity. A word that evolved itself inside out over time, in the same way we do.

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in January 1995, into a typical Latino family. Three siblings, a mother, a father, a dog, and a never-ending procession of second, third, and fourth cousins introduced to me gradually over the years.  It was a warm, loud, and very joyful childhood. Family gatherings were constant. Some of the ones I remember best were the Christmas reunions, all the cousins circled around the tree, waiting out the novena prayers so we could finally get to Papá Noel's presents, and leave a living room filled with wrapping papers. Although I was born in the capital, my parents moved us early on to La Dorada, a small town four hours away from it. I remember being super happy there. Life was based around school friends, adventures with the neighborhood kids, and the impossible-to-miss Sunday Church. Mom used to say, “If you don’t go to church, you don’t go out this week!”. 

Then, one day, life took a quick turn. My parents sat us down and said, "we are moving to Spain." What. The. Heck. “What about my friends? My grandparents?”, I remember thinking.  From one moment to another I was no longer in the humid oven that was La Dorada, I was teleported to the arid plains of Extremadura, and school started, just like that. Looking back, moving to Spain felt like a life reset, like we had been uprooted rather than moved, it all happened so fast it still feels like a dream when I think about it. I woke up one day going to a different school, my friends gone, and the language that was supposed to be the same turned out, in daily occasions, to feel foreign.  Life has a way of taking a single decision that can grab the identity you thought was sure and true, the one you believed defined you down to the bone, and shatter it.

It was the first time I asked myself: “why do I feel like a different person here, compared to home? Why does it feel so strange to be who I am?”. I have wondered many times since what would have happened to me if my parents had never left Colombia. Who would I be if we would have never moved?

At that age, what shaped my identity was not something I had chosen for myself, it was the people around me. I shared their values, their beliefs, their rhythms, mostly because as a child I had never been given a reason to question them. I was, in the gentlest sense, a back-seat passenger in life's flying carpet. In fact, I had never questioned who I was before moving. Learning to adapt in Spain gave me the foundations. Not answers, but the first real practice at choosing, at setting limits on who I was willing to be told I was, and to shape my own identity based on who I wanted to be - not what the society was expecting me to be. Then, six years after leaving, I went back to Colombia with my family. And it was there, of all places, that the shift became impossible to ignore. Many of the beliefs I grew up with had changed, quietly, without me noticing exactly when. There were moments I could not understand why I was seeing the world differently, or why in occasions I was feeling like an alien in my own country.  It would have been easy to read that as loss. Instead, I understood something else: being different was not a failure of belonging, it was a kind of power.

Being born somewhere does not define you. Neither does the place you happen to be standing when someone asks where you're from. You are the sum of what you lived through and what you decided, deliberately, to keep. That, I think, is the real superpower nobody tells us. Not fitting in perfectly anywhere, means you can fit in everywhere. It means the discomfort of not belonging stops being a wound and starts being proof that no one else gets to decide who you are. I think it means that when something is unjust, you have already practiced, more than once, the courage of standing apart from the crowd and speaking out.  Being caught between cultures is in the end not a bad thing, and “that” represents our powerful own culture.

For the past 10 years, I’ve had the chance to live on 3 very different continents, and it stopped being about accepting what the surroundings told me I was, and became about selection. Each place I’ve lived gave me something I chose to keep or let go of something I didn't need anymore, the same way the word identity itself had, centuries ago, meant something evolved into almost its opposite. Identity once meant sameness. Somewhere along the way, as the world stopped assigning people fixed places and started asking them to build their own, the word turned itself inside out. I like to think I did the same. What I kept was never an accident. It was a choice, made over and over, in every country that ever asked me to become someone new. And I intend to keep choosing.

There were years I judged the choices my parents made. Today I can proudly say I am grateful that their choices led me here. I don't think I will ever become fully myself, and I don’t think I will ever arrive somewhere final to call it finished. But wherever I land next, I take with me a bag full of memories, and 3 things mom and dad gave me before I knew to ask for them: freedom, humanity, and love. They always made sure I never forgot my values, even as I kept adding new places to the list. And they taught me, without ever needing to say it directly, that home was never a country to begin with.