Who are you?

Identity isn’t a feeling.
It’s not confidence or pride —
those are reflections of it, not its core.

Identity isn’t a label.
It’s a living system —
made up of memory, belief, culture, and emotion.
Structured, yet layered.
Always shifting, stretching, and sometimes splintering
under the weight of expectation.

Identity is the collection of meanings, memories, values, and experiences
that shape how you understand yourself —
and how the world recognizes you.

It’s not how you feel to be —
it’s who you are.
It’s the space between your truth
and the version the world tries to hand you.
The quiet tension between belonging and becoming.

For some, identity is steady —
a thread connecting past and present.
But for others — those shaped by migration, culture, or difference —
identity is something you rebuild from fragments.

It’s internal: the private knowing of who you are.
And it’s external: the reflection cast by systems
that decide which parts of you are visible,
and which must be erased.

The system was built for us to struggle for identity —
that’s how you know it was never meant to be preserved.
We were meant to choose between belonging and authenticity,
between visibility and peace.

Yet somehow, we preserve it anyway —
through culture.

Because identity isn’t linear.

Always,

Zahra

✨  When silence speaks louder than words…
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