My aunt is a name on a headstone now.
It’s carved in granite, serifed letters spelling out a beginning and an end, a phrase about love that was chosen because it sounded nice, not because it sounded like her. And the obituary- Black ink on thin paper, neatly printed words telling the world who she was: a daughter, a mother, a sister, gone too soon. It says she was kind, she was loved, she is missed .
My aunt was bigger than the obituary that tried to fit her into neat lines.
It told the world where she was born, who she loved, the date she arrived and the date she left, with a small dash in between that was meant to hold everything she was. But how do you fit a whole person into a paragraph? How do you fit her laughter, her stubbornness, her warmth, her sharp edges and soft spaces, into something so small?
People talk about how she changed.
Before she left him, she was quieter. Diminished. People say she made herself small to survive, folding in her edges, dimming her light. When I was little, I didn’t see the shape of the walls around her—I only saw the way she smiled, the way she moved, the way she existed. But now, looking back, I see the invisible box she lived in, the space she was allowed to take up. I see how, when she finally stepped outside of it, she grew into herself again.
People don’t talk about how she made the best cinnamon sugar tortillas in the world.
But that’s how I remember her.
She talked as she cooked, filling the air with words the way she filled the house with the smell of frying tortillas. My cousin and I sat on the couch, sticky-fingered and sugar-mouthed, eating straight from the bowl, giggling as she pretended to scold us. “You’ll rot your teeth out, sillies,” she’d say, but she let us do it anyway.
That’s who she was.
Not the woman confined to a headstone, not the name in an obituary, not the version of her that shrank to fit someone else’s world. She was bigger than all of that. She was warmth and sweetness, sharp wit and soft laughter. She was someone who took up space, who deserved to take up space.
Identity isn’t a list of facts or the sum of the things we do. It isn’t our choices, but the weight they leave behind. Actions do not define your identity, but the way the actions made you feel—the joy, the regret, the love, the longing. My aunt was not just a woman who made tortillas in a warm kitchen; she was the way that moment felt. Safe. Sweet. Whole. She was the laughter that filled the air, the quiet permission to take what we wanted from the sugar bowl, the unspoken understanding that love is something given freely, not something you have to earn.
Through her life and her freedom, I’ve come to understand that identity isn’t something you find in the roles you play or the things you accomplish. It’s not about being seen a certain way or meeting expectations. It’s about how you feel in your own skin, how you resonate with the moments that define you, and how you allow yourself to grow into who you are meant to be. Watching my aunt step into her truth after years of holding herself back has shown me that I don’t need to fit into a mold or live up to anyone else’s idea of who I should be. It’s helped me realize that my place in the world doesn’t depend on what others think, but on the way I move through it, the way I choose to express myself, and the way I embrace the moments that make me feel alive. Just like her, I’m learning to step outside the boxes and let myself be bigger than the labels people try to put on me.
That's what identity really is to me—the parts of us too big to be written down, the pieces of ourselves that others carry forward, the stories told in kitchens, the sugar stolen from bowls, and the moments that meant everything- even for a single second.
This article was the first-place teen winner in the Exploring Identity writing contest, part of the 2025 Salem Reads: One Book, One Community program, which delved into the themes of Why Didn't You Tell Me? A Memoir by Carmen Rita Wong. The contest invited writers, in short story or personal essay form, to explore how identity has impacted them.