Take a look at the people around you, and the majority will probably agree to questioning their identity at some point in their life. Some constantly go through an intense identity crisis that strongly affects their life, while the most struggle some have gone through has been whether or not a certain color of clothing seemed to match their personality.
The majority probably fall somewhere in between like I do. I have never felt an identity crisis so extreme that I didn't know who I was, but the "who am I?" question often lingered in my head. It's never been problematic enough to affect my life, but it's been enough to make me lose sleep every once in a while. The scariest question that I think about is probably whether my interests and personality today are really of my own choices or if it was molded by what society saw in me. If I never heard any opinion from any other person, would I still act the way I do today?
If you've never thought about this question, apologies. You'll probably be thinking about it in the middle of the night now.
That being said, I have never been able to answer the question of "where are you from?" with one response. I could list out all the places I've lived in and nationalities of my family and extended families. I can speak English and Mandarin perfectly fine, and I could fangirl over Ed Sheeran just as much as I fangirl over JJ Lin. When you possess the defining traits of multiple countries, that question becomes extremely difficult.
Am I American? Am I Taiwanese? Am I Taiwanese-American?
It's hard to answer that question when I still accidentally blurt out Chinese while speaking English and get comments on how my Mandarin has a heavy English accent attached to it. It's even more confusing when fellow Asian-Americans consider me more "fob" than the usual Asian-American, yet "fob" Asians consider me whitewashed. Now, this doesn't bother me anymore because there are aspects of each category that I fit into and that I love. Who cares if I forget who I'm talking to and accidentally speak the wrong language? It shows that I'm bilingual, and being bilingual is cool. It doesn't matter if I listen to JJ Lin non-stop because I'm listening to songs about romance and love instead of songs about money and drugs.
At the end of the day, having a mild identity crisis isn't a bad thing.
It forces you to understand yourself more and allows you to become more self-aware.
Everybody questions who they are to some extent, so don't feel like you're the one going through this.
