Who Am I? Finding My Identity
In the warm embrace of the Waiʻanae mountain range I began my dance with life, born into a family where love was abundant, but resources were scarce. My roots sank deep into the soil of a large extended family, each member a branch of the lush tree that my grandmother, the matriarch, had grown. With thirteen siblings of her own, she wove a tapestry of kinship that stretched from Makaha to Nanakuli, a testament to closeness not merely by blood but by the songs of our native hearts. Grandma was a woman of resilience, whose life's symphony was composed of melodies sweet and sorrowful, each note a story, harmonizing into a ballad that echoed the vast depths of her experiences of love, loss, and new beginnings.
Our lives, nomadic in their essence, fluttered from one westside valley to another, carried by trails of poverty and familial discord. I come from a family that knows the rhythm of the earth beneath our feet, yet the ground of our lives never stopped shaking. My childhood home was a revolving door of locations.
I was just one of five siblings, and we rode the waves of our parents' relentless dreams of family life, their passionate disputes, and the rare calm that came before the storm of their eventual split. It was my grandparents who often stepped in to fill the void, their wisdom vast as the ocean, even if their formal education wasn't recognized by a diploma.
Growing up in Waiʻanae, I was embraced by a community that felt like the sun on my back, but in school, there was a different kind of warmth—a burning sense that being Hawaiian somehow meant I was less capable, less intelligent. It was a murmur in the background of every classroom, a silent verdict that I struggled to dismiss.
The chasm between my friends' affluence and my own financial struggles was stark, as evident as the difference between my reliance on free school meals and their unfamiliarity with it. Clutching the blue ticket that symbolized my family's need, I was awash with a deep sense of shame. That blue ticket, it shouted my status louder than any words could, marking me as someone to be pitied, someone different. This dread of being exposed as "less than," as a beneficiary of charity, gnawed at me more fiercely than any physical hunger ever had. In the grocery store, I'd become a master of evasion, slipping away to hide the fact that our groceries were purchased with food stamps, those vivid slips of paper that felt like badges of poverty.
In the eighth grade, a door seemed to open—a scholarship to a private high school, a beacon of hope promising escape from the confines of the identity of a girl from Waiʻanae. My teachers saw potential in me, urging me forward. My closest friends, twins who were like sisters, joined me in this venture, our heads filled with visions of a future paved with shared triumphs at an esteemed institution. But reality can be cruel; when the results came in, my castle in the sky fell apart. They were in; I wasn't. The stigma I fought to escape clung to me with renewed force. It appeared I was nothing more than the stereotype I dreaded: a poor, unintelligent Hawaiian girl from Waiʻanae.
But there was another part of me, a summer identity where I transformed into the grandchild of kalo farmers, embodying a true Hawaiian existence in Keʻanae, Maui. In those months, I was a child of the earth, a guardian of ancestral ways, living a life not governed by the trappings of modernity but by the timeless pulse of the land. My hands toiled in the loʻi, my skin soaked in the embrace of mountain streams, and my stomach was nourished by the land's generosity. Then came a summer when the loʻi grew quiet, the streams ran dry, and the kalo perished, taking with it a fragment of my soul.
Back in Waiʻanae, I found my escape in stories—they were my refuge, my inspiration. I plunged into narratives unfurled on screens, fantasizing about lives far removed from my own. I found comfort in music, in the drama of characters oblivious to my existence, and I began to pursue an identity that was nothing but a mirage. I dreamt myself into these stories, crafting a persona that stood in stark contrast to my own reality. These dreams painted in the vivid colors of someone else's imagination pushed me to the land of stories where I could be anyone, anything, except who I truly was. In Hollywood, I sought this invented self, only to discover that the most significant story was the one I had left behind—my own.
In the mirror of time, I see now the mosaic of identities I've worn – the poor Hawaiian girl from Waiʻanae, the granddaughter of kalo farmers, the dreamer ensnared by the siren call of stories. But in each reflection, I also see the resilience of heritage, the strength of roots, and the wisdom that comes from understanding that the richest narrative is the one you author for yourself. This is her story - -A story of a Hawaiian girl from Waiʻanae, who learned that her true narrative was still hers to write.
Comments
Post a Comment