The summer after my freshman year of college messed up my life. I had it all planned out. My first year of college had been amazing. I’d made a ton of new friends whom I loved spending time with and I had started dating a girl early in the year. 

Even though I am Navajo, I didn’t grow up in a household that practiced the traditional ways. I was raised believing in God and going to church every Sunday, but I never took any of it to heart.

A woman I know has a habit of naming her years. Come January 1, she’ll choose a word for the year ahead—something she’d like to be true of the coming months, such as community or adventure or love. If I were to go back and name the past ten years of my life, most of them would share the same few words: Judgment. Guilt. Fear.

When you hear the word multiethnicity, what comes to mind? Your childhood neighborhood? Your college circle of friends? The ethnic sections of the grocery store?

There’s a scene in About a Boy where Hugh Grant’s character describes his life as made up of half-hour blocks—not so much time as to be intimidating, but long enough to do things. Once he adds up all of those blocks, his unemployed self says, “I often wonder, to be absolutely honest, if I’d ever have time for a job.”

People often ask me what my ethnicity is. Usually they assume I am Chinese—or Korean, if they have never met a Korean person before.