I sat in a stuffy classroom at William Paterson University, the classroom where I took one of my first courses back when I had transferred from community college. A few minutes into the class and I am asked what I identify with above everything else; without hesitation, I answered woman. Above all, more than ethnicity or religion or sexuality, I said woman. My professor asked me why that was and I couldn't answer her.

So, in that cramped William Paterson classroom, I chose woman, and it took me some time to figure out why. I came to realize that the identity of woman instilled a fear of dark nights and staring boys, that the identity of woman made me rush to my car as I left work and had a male friend walking me through the parking garage at night. I chose woman because it is the only identity that feels valid in my life, as though I could hold it in my palm and curl my fingers around the edges. It is mine and I own it. It may dictate parts of my life or sway certain factors, but at the core, it is wholly mine.

But, woman can't be everything. I can't really just be one identity. People have multiple identities and sometimes it seems endless if you were to list them all. Even with my feminine fear and pride overflowing like waves kicking up sand, my identity feels as barren as a dried up lake bed, cracked and crumbling with lifeless dust filling the seams. The cracks are packed with grilled bratwurst and tangy sauerkraut. A language that is rough around the edges and feels like a foggy morning, where you can't see the road in front of you, seeps up from the tiny fissures. I go to Oktoberfest so many times a year and still don't know how to say thank you to the older woman who served the potato pancakes. I quickly google searched a proper translation, to feel less like an intruder. "Danke," I said. But the word tasted like sand-paper on my tongue.

I am a fourth generation German-American who is trying to claim a lineage, who is trying to have an ethnic culture, and it is long gone.

When I was in high school, I had to choose between Spanish, German, or French. Without really thinking about it, I chose Spanish because many of my friends spoke Spanish and could help me if I fell behind. The German classes felt like an elite club where only people who had relatives still living in Europe could be part of; I didn't even know what my grandparents and great grandparents looked like. Over and over again, people would drop out of the German classes, saying that the language was too difficult and that they'd never use it in real life. If we're being honest, the German language has disappeared from our culture so fast that even some of the older generations have stopped speaking it.

My father hangs the German national flag at the bottom of the raised deck and it hovers over the yard like a reminder that we're not really German at all, but we try so hard to be. We have the lineage, we have the bratwurst, we have the festivals and the Die Nationalmannschaft shirts for when the Euro tournament comes around. We try so hard to have a culture that is not our own because when someone asks, "what is American culture?" We don't know how to respond.

All we have are cuisine and awkwardly hung flags of nations we've never even been to. We no longer have the language. We no longer have the culture, a culture that was washed away from assimilation and dissolved into the yellowy broth of the melting pot.

I am a fourth generation German-American who doesn't feel German at all.