At the core of each of us, there is a soul - physical, metaphorical, made up by society to encourage morality, the definition does not matter. We each have a soul, and that soul is a combination of every thought and feeling you have ever had. It is every person that you have ever been influenced by, good or bad. It is everything that ever caught your interest. In a word, it is you. And you are something you should never, ever hide or be ashamed of.
It begins with your birth. Actually, it begins before that. It begins the moment your parents find out about you. It begins with the story they tell you when you're old enough to understand how you came into being. They learned that you were there, tiny, just barely a dot on the spectrum of existence, and you changed everything.
Maybe there was excitement, or shock, or dread. Maybe they needed a little bit of time to accept that you were really there and that they were ready for you. That is the beginning of your story, the one that they tell you. Mine began with a visit to the hospital and a nurse announcing, very loudly, that my mother couldn't get any more pregnant than that.
You grow and become a person. You have interests from the moment you learn to comprehend more than just your own little body's needs - Dora the Explorer, Barney the Dinosaur, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and anything in between. They are tempered by your parents or your siblings or your friends, and that doesn't necessarily change as you get older; their influence may just lessen a little or a lot. You have a crush on a boy or a girl in kindergarten, or you think you do...then he gets a buzzcut and suddenly he's just not so cute anymore.
You have more crushes, each one a little better understood to you, and each a little different. All of this growing you do stays with you forever, in the forms of memories and nostalgia (and maybe a little bit of irritation) when you turn on the TV and Nick Jr. is playing reruns.
You have feelings about other people. You love your family, if you are lucky, and to be honest I'm not sure what you feel if you are unlucky, because I myself grew up blessed in the family area, even though now I realize that we are absolutely far from perfect. Maybe you are protected from the world until it just can't be held back anymore, or maybe you are exposed to it from the very beginning. Whatever your circumstances, you grow up into someone that you would not be without them or these people that began in your life and the ones that entered later.
You learn to love in so many different ways that it's hard to keep track. All you know is that each love is a different one, and love is a word that is impossible to be defined. And sometimes, you dislike other people. You meet someone who you just cannot understand and don't care to. You meet someone who makes your whole body go tense with irritation and the urge to snap. Whether or not you snap is an indication of how much control you have over yourself, or, depending on the other person, how much courage you have.
You have feelings about yourself. Perhaps, even at a young age, you look in the mirror and wonder why you aren't pretty like your best friend in first grade or your older sister or handsome like your older brother or your father. Perhaps it takes a really, really long time to be happy with your face and body, even though everyone you love has told you all your life that you are beautiful, exactly how you are meant to be. Perhaps, you come to the conclusion yourself.
Or perhaps it takes one special person to make you really believe it for the first time. It's okay if you don't believe it until that person comes along. They are a part of your beauty, the part that finally wakes up.
You, your body, your soul, are an infinite number of things, ever-changing. You will never stop becoming yourself until the day you die, and maybe not even then. Maybe you continue after and discover things you only speculated about when you were alive. Everything you are comes from the way you grow up and the things and people you come to love, even your very self. That is your identity. Embrace it; it's the only one you truly get.