Identities: Informative Interpretations of Individuals & their Implications

I am that I am! I'm a spiritual being on a human journey as much as I am a human being on a spiritual journey. I'm more in touch with my human side, but I'm growing my understanding of my spirit self. And learning to integrate these two aspects of me has been necessary for my personal development.

I've come to realize how very attached I am to my human identity. From my name to the various other descriptors that I use to capture my essence, I value the words that help me and others conceptualize who I am.

Language is my friend, for sure; I love what language offers. Words open up my world and offer me a certain kind of freedom and comfort.

I AM bilingual. My native language is Spanish, but my primary language is English. I love being able to navigate the world - my world - in two languages.

Something you discover when you speak more than one language is that there aren't clear-cut translations in all languages. Not all words exist across all languages and some words in one language don't lend themselves well to the linguistic nuances of another. So, it's no surprise that the more languages that one knows, the broader vocabulary one has overall.

I also venture to say that the more languages one knows, the more open-minded one is or the more flexible one's thinking becomes when compared to a monolingual person. I imagine this is true (and I'm sure there's science somewhere that can substantiate my hypothesis) because a multilingual person must hold not only a bigger depository of words, but also be able to understand and process the relationships between the different letters/characters and the meanings of words within and across different languages.

Now, as expansive as language is, it can also be both limited and limiting, particularly when it comes to identity labels. Some may be observable, straight-forward, and easily accepted by people who hear them while others are not. Some words are relatively new and others have been around for a while, but evoke emotional reactions from some.

For example, if I say, I AM a brown-eyed person or I AM right-handed; nobody is going to misunderstand or wish to poke further or judge what I mean by that. But when I say I AM genderqueer or I AM spiritual or I AM an immigrant; those labels carry some extra weight to them because there's room for interpretation and can triggers implicit biases. For these reasons, some people are very anti-labels because they are afraid of being put in a box and excluded because of it or even persecuted. It is the reason that still to this day, people in many professions choose to not disclose certain aspects of their identity.

I AM political! Because I am many of the things that I am, I cannot afford to opt out of politics. My mere existence makes me political because I live in a country and in a world that still thinks certain parts of me entitle others to diminish my humanity. As a result, there are certain labels that some might see as offensive, but in certain circles and spaces, they proclaim my pride. And some identities evolve and as new language is introduced to us, the labels can also change.

For instance, I AM queer, but throughout my journey, I've used the terms Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Dyke, Butch, Butch Dyke, Homo, Brown Boi, and Papi Chulo to mean queer. Now I mostly use queer because it encompasses my sexuality and gender identity and it's a former derogatory term that has been reclaimed by many in our rainbow community and broadly accepted by the younger generations. Although, to be clear, people's preferences for certain labels over others varies; there's no official consensus.

I AM Latinx as well, but when I was young, the most common term was Hispanic, which I quickly dropped for Latina until I found Latinx and which I occasionally replace with Latine. Using Latine with the E on the end is part of an effort to make the Spanish language less gendered and more inclusive; so, instead of a feminine A or masculine O or a clumsy X, we add an E to replace the A/O. So, if you're in the know, without me telling you so, if I say I'm Latine, then you might ask me my pronouns or default to using they/them (or elle in Spanish) because you know that either I don't identify as cis-gender or, if I do, I'm an ally trying to be inclusive.

Either way, when I use Latine, I'm communicating quite a bit with just that one label and for some it's too much or too hard or whatever. While some embrace the idea of shifting heavily gendered languages in this way, many who take issue with language changing and wishing to keep its origins or purity or whatever, clap back with hostility against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Heck, the truth is that I didn't know I was genderqueer until my late 30s when language that helps explain and describe the spectrum of gender identity became the hot and contested topic.

I'm grateful everyday for my younger siblings who expanded our community even further and gave more nuanced and accurate language to my personal experience with gender. I still use she/her pronouns along with they/them for example because I don't want to give up my historic alignment with the identities of female or woman given the experience of being born with a vulva, but when I think about it that identity never felt quite right to me; I just didn't have something else to describe myself. I'm at the point in my gender journey, where I don't call myself a woman, but don't care of others see me as one. In the same way, I no longer get mad when I'm perceived to be male, which I am at times now and have been in the past as well.

Nowadays, I find myself in a very different kind of quandary as I explore the language used in my spiritual teachings. I AM Catholic; technically, but I'm not practicing and mostly I say I'm a recovering Catholic because that's how I feel. Still, I claim the identity less not to claim the religion, but more as a part of my background or foundational understanding of faith. I don't subscribe to any organized religion or formal dogma, but that doesn't mean I'm any less spiritual. I used to say I'm agnostic, but now that I'm exploring my mysticism, I consider myself more of a gnostic. But I'm relatively new to this; so, I stick to the most general terms and simply say that I AM spiritual.

To be honest, it is this spiritual part of my identity that I feel the most uneasy about. You see, in order to feel free to be other aspects of me, I felt I had to reject my spirituality. It was always there, but I did not embrace it fully because I felt rejected - rejected by the church and those in my circles who held strong religious and homophobic convictions. I've unpacked a lot of that and am in a better place with it, but now I'm struggling with another issue - the fact that many of the spiritual spaces I'm in or find in my searches feel white-washed and appropriative. They're either spreading toxic positivity or a little too disconnected from our corporal experiences in this time and space reality. I can feel the tension in my body when I proclaim this to somebody new because although I'm a bit woo woo, I'm no Zen Buddha wannabe on a mountain, I'm grounded!

Like I said, I'm still very attached to my identities, but not in the way I was before. Why? Because I know that for all the things I may claim to be in this lifetime, the human that I am here and now is only temporary. I know I'm so much more than my current comprehension allows me to see and more than my imagination can conceive.

I believe that I am this animated energy, purposely designed and packaged in this physical form to experience all I need to experience for my soul to grow. I believe in reincarnation; so, when I die, I know it's not the end of my human adventures. It's just a return to the all-loving and affirming source energy, which is divine and envelops the universe; I become one with all. And then when I'm good and ready, I'll come back in a new body to learn all I can learn and assume my new identity in the late 21st or early 22nd century.

For now, I'm learning to be happy with myself as I am; grateful for all that I am right now, for all that I've been, and for all that I will become. I'm working on loving myself and on fully embracing that change and death are inevitable parts of life.