Identity

"I was born in a small country next to India, but grew up in England and Australia for most of my life before coming to America, which is why I have a funny accent" was one of my first responses on my first day in junior high, during my first month in Dallas, Texas. There was one thing that was true about that statement, and it didn't have anything to do with England or Australia. Well, not entirely. This is the story of how I lost myself.

I was 13 when I visited the States with my family. The only other country I had visited up until then was an impromptu trip to West Bengal. It was after 9/11, and getting a visa for the whole family to visit my uncle in Texas wasn't really a possibility according to my father, but he had been planning for it for a while. And, since he had visited multiple times before, he wanted to take the whole family to show the things he had seen, the places he had visited. America was a place from his dreams, and he wanted us to see it with our own eyes. So, when against our wildest dreams, we got all of our visas approved, my whole family was beyond ecstatic. My mother had always loved to travel, and she was finally going to go see America. My sister was excited to see our cousin Ashley, and my brother was going to celebrate his first birthday in Los Angeles, our last layover before Dallas. I don't remember my exact feelings about it at the time, but it must have been a mixture of excitement, fear, anxiety, and preteen angst.

Soon after we got to Dallas, talks began between my uncle and my father to find a way for all of us to stay there, permanently. After all, how often do you get a chance to enter America as a family, and get a chance to create a life here? My father was persuaded easily, and he started applying for his worker's visa. In order to close up loose ends back home, he decided to take a trip, leaving my mother, sister, and I with my uncle. In a few weeks, with my uncle taking a contract job in Germany, this left my mother to take care of her family and his, in a foreign land.

As this was unfolding, I was becoming more and more mesmerized by the notion of creating a new life in the States. I had lived a beautiful life in Bangladesh growing up. My parents raised my sister and I in a very comfortable way, educating us in both English and Bangla as our primary languages, and not often letting us lack in anything. But, there was just so much here. I could start a new life. I could be a new person. My uncle put my sister and I in the nearest junior high, since we had nothing else to do, and there, I saw more diversity than I had in my entire life up until then. As my sister starter missing our homeland more and more, I grew detached from it more and more and started embracing America more and more. I wanted to have friends from all over the world, and this land was going to let me have that. So, when on the first day, in math class, a cute girl asked to see my schedule to see if we had any other classes together, I felt my heart beat out of my chest in excitement as I blurted out "skedzh-ool?", hoping that she would clarify what she meant. But, she kept saying the same word over and over again, until she noticed a piece of paper in my backpack that she could point to. I said, "that's my shed-yool", to which I got nothing but a confused look. She said, "You're weird", and walked away. That's when I realized that no matter how much English I spoke back at home, I was still in a foreign land. I can't pinpoint to the feeling that I felt back then, but thinking back, I feel that I almost got stabbed right in the heart. That girl could have been my first friend, but because of what I said (or how I said it), that friendship died before it could start.

I think most people would have been able to look past this mishap and carried on with their mission, but my 13 year old self had so much shame and guilt and agony inside that he couldn't do it. I couldn't carry on. Not with this weird version f me, anyhow. I needed to find a cover, a way to hide my true migrant, muslim self. In the next few minutes, I created a construct; a construct made up of another foreign land, but one that would be easier for middle schoolers in the US to understand. I took the British English I grew up with back at home, and spun that into a story of its own, where I was a boy who lived in England for most of his life, who had finally come to America to live with his family. As a cover for my lack of English accent, I added a part about living in Australia. And to fully encapsulate the story, I took the idea of schooling in Darjeeling (which was something my father was talking about before our trip to America, but I never experienced) and mixed that in. The next person I saw that day, that was the version of me they met; a boy who had lived in different parts of the world, and now has come to America. That is the same story that my classmates from my next class heard, and it continued. Before I realized, this story became, and almost all people who have met me since then, including my best friends,  know that version of me, a version that doesn't exist in reality. At the time, I used it as a crutch because I wasn't comfortable with who I was, and up until three months ago, I hadn't really thought of it as a lie. I actually believed this part of my life so much that I had more dreams about growing up in Blackpool, England (which I picked up from FIFA in my mid-teens) than I did of my childhood in Dhaka. Somehow, I erased most memories of my true childhood and replaced them with artificial creations of my own making. The small lie that I created to be comfortable around peers became something that I started reciting around parties and gatherings. Up until three months ago, I didn't think that I was doing anything wrong. Until I realized that by telling this story to myself and others, I was denying myself and others who I really was. The sensations in my body were telling me what the thoughts in my head were not.

In the last few months, I have come out with my truth to some of my closest friends. It hasn't been easy. In fact, it has been one of most challenging times of my life, standing there and admitting to others that I have been a fraud, to myself and them. But, by making amends, I am hoping to find my identity once more.