The Higher Lens : 2
Which parts of your identity were chosen — and which were inherited without question?
Identity is often spoken of as something personal, even individual — a thing we create for ourselves. But sociologists have long argued that identity is just as much given as it is claimed. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984) described in his work on habitus, much of who we are is formed through socialization — the internalization of values, tastes, and behaviors inherited from our environment, long before we consciously choose them. This interplay between the inherited and the chosen has defined much of my own journey, particularly as a child of Kosovan descent raised in the UK.
There are parts of my identity I never questioned because they were always there — stitched into the fabric of family, language, and memory. I inherited a sense of belonging to a country I was not born in, but that shaped every family story, every phrase of pride or pain spoken in Albanian around the dinner table. I inherited cultural expressions of resilience — the pride of a people who survived war, exile, and rebuilding — alongside customs, foods, and rituals that quietly kept my identity alive even when everything around me spoke English.
At the same time, having lived in the UK my entire life, I’ve also chosen parts of my identity — out of exposure, curiosity, and necessity. I chose to engage with British political culture, to pursue studies in European politics, and to explore ideas beyond what my inherited context would have exposed me to. I’ve chosen to question the systems I was raised in — both British and Albanian — and to find my voice within the spaces in between. This is what sociologist Stuart Hall (1996) referred to when he wrote about identity as a “production,” something always in process, positioned at the intersection of history, culture, and individual agency.
Choosing to study sociology, for example, was itself a way of reclaiming a perspective that had long been dismissed as too “soft” or “feminine.” It was an act of defiance against academic hierarchies that often silence cultural and emotional insight in favor of rational abstraction. Within sociology, I found tools to name what I had only felt: the way gender norms operated differently in Kosovan households versus British schools, or how class and ethnicity shaped the kinds of futures we imagine for ourselves.
Even ambition, confidence, and independence are part of how identity takes shape — not just in what we inherit, but in what we insist on becoming. I’ve always been driven, curious, and outspoken. But were those traits natural, chosen, or simply responses to the world around me? In environments that underestimated young women, especially in academic or political spaces, I found myself working twice as hard — not to prove others wrong, but to prove to myself that I belonged there in the first place.
And that brings up a bigger question: is gender identity, or is it performance? Is the way I carry myself — assertive, analytical, at times even defiant — a reflection of who I am, or a reflection of who I’ve had to be? That’s a conversation for another time, but it lingers beneath every choice. As Judith Butler suggests, gender isn’t something we are — it’s something we do, shaped and reshaped by expectations, resistance, and experience.
In truth, identity is not a clear boundary between what is inherited and what is chosen — it’s a conversation between the two. My experience of being a Kosovan in Britain has made that especially clear. I carry both the weight and the wisdom of a history I did not live through, and I also reach for ideas, beliefs, and communities that stretch beyond the narratives I was handed. Some parts of me were given — the language, the stories, the symbols. Others I’ve built — through reading, through writing, through asking better questions.
And that, perhaps, is the power of reflection: to stop accepting identity as fixed and to begin seeing it — like vision through a higher lens — as something always in motion, shaped by history but never entirely bound by it.