Identity Crisis

“You don’t look Polish,” a family friend once told me. And before I knew how to respond I was thinking to myself – “Is what I look like who I am?”

I am a few inches above 5 feet, solidly built (aka fat), with blonde hair and blue eyes. I forgot to mention, I’m female. I’ve worn glasses since high school when I realized that the blurriness around me was not my way of disengaging with the world. I like to read but I also watch an unhealthy amount of television shows. I’m sure that neither one of those things helps with my vision. When I was 5 years old my parents took me and left Poland altogether. We lived with my grandmother in California where the sunshine made my hair lighter and my temperament brighter. After awhile we settled as a family of four (my brother the American) in Toronto, Canada. In Toronto I discovered that I wasn’t different enough, I blended in too well. But I too was an immigrant.

And so my identity has never been easy to pin point. Am I Canadian? Sure. Am I Polish? Depends on who you ask. Am I an American? Hell, no! Perhaps like my father I am a citizen of the world. Whatever that means?

I’ve heard that you can be whatever you want to be and that you should never let people define you. But it’s easier said then done when those around you seem to be the experts on these things.

What I look like and how I feel don’t exactly go hand in hand. Take for instance my self proclaimed fatness. I know this comes from an age old insecurity and a need to love myself through food. But some days I feel like I could weigh a thousand pounds and that no one could possibly love me for who I am on the inside. (What a cliché!) But there I go again, caring what other people think about me. Those so-called experts! There are people who are fatter than me, of course. And if I really think about where I get the idea of me being too fat I start thinking about advertising and subliminal messaging through media. Maybe in a way I start making excuses. What does it mean to be fat in western culture? It’s a sort of failure, but what then is success?

When I first became aware of transgendered people I had a real identity crisis. I never knew there was an option in terms of your gender?! This blew my mind. Not to say that I’m thinking of changing genders. But my body has never really felt my own and this ‘getting comfortable with who I really am’ was what I thought growing up was meant to do. But there were people out there who were redefining the very essence of their beings. I was truly impressed by their conviction and 100% knowledge of the fact that they knew who they were really meant to be. I don’t think changing my gender would work for me even if I’m not fully comfortable in my female body all the time – I’ve learned to make do with it.

Is “making do” a form of acceptance or defeat? I know I’ll never be tall or skinny even if I did go on some sort of health kick. But I’m ok with my shortness – I like it when people have to strain their necks to have to talk to me. And to some extent I’m ok with the fact that I don’t fit into a size 0 which I have always thought was a ridiculous size to be. A size nothing? I also like challenging pre-conceived notions of what a female should be. Sometimes I find it hard to stick out and go against the grain but that’s part of the fun.

So I can get over the physical parts of who I am and who I should be. But for some reason, what I am on the inside gives me a harder time. Defining my identity and making sure I don’t fall into the hyphenated melting pot of immigration has always been something that interested me greatly. I love to read diasporic literature or the immigrant tale. I’ve always related very well to the self-deprecating Jew even if I myself am not Jewish. And yes, I'm aware that Poles are suppose to be anti-Semites but stereotypes don't always run across the board. 

So maybe looking Polish is a bigger problem for me then I expected. Because it would mean that even though I don’t feel like a true Pole on the inside that at least I was fooling some people on the outside. And I’m not. I’m only fooling myself.