The Question That Changed My Identity
How Revisiting My Story as the Observer Led to Freedom Beyond Victimhood.
Discover how author Marcela Gómez found a new identity by challenging her beliefs and revisiting a painful story as the observer. This process has allowed her to continuously reclaim her strength and value.
Marcela with her son Esteban. Miami, 1993.
On an unusually sunny day in 1992 in Bogotá, Colombia, a city in the Andes Mountains where rain is more common than sunshine, I asked a question that triggered the beginning of the end of the life I was living. That morning, the sky was blue, and the temperature was around 70 degrees Fahrenheit—rare conditions in my birth city.
At the time, I was married. My husband had already left for work, my two-year-old son was at the neighborhood daycare he attended twice a week, and our housekeeper was inside preparing lunch. I stepped outside our home in a gated community of twenty houses on the north side of Bogotá. Sitting on a bench under the blue sky, I looked up and said, “I’m Jorge’s wife and Esteban’s mother, but who am I?” I remember feeling confused by the question that had crossed my mind. I wasn’t unhappy in these roles, yet those words came from my soul.
When my husband got home from work that same day, he was quieter than usual and seemed distant. I went upstairs to greet him, walked into our bedroom, and found him sitting on the bed, absorbed in the news on TV. After a brief exchange where I leaned in to kiss him, I began sharing details about my day and our neighborhood activities. Abruptly, he interrupted me and said, “I don’t have peace, I want to separate.” The weight of his words was so intense that I felt as if I had been pushed against the closet doors of our small bedroom.
Our son was only two and a half years old. Our marriage had not been planned, nor had our pregnancy. My son’s father and I met in college while studying advertising in Bogotá. We had dated for about a year before breaking up due to differing life plans after graduation. A few months later, we ran into each other at a friend’s party, started talking and dancing, and I went home with him.
The pregnancy was a shock, confirmed after an anxious eight-day wait for blood test results in 1989—a time when instant pregnancy tests were not available in Colombia. When the results finally confirmed the pregnancy, my first reaction was to curse and cry. Sitting in his car, reading the results, we struggled to believe it was happening to us.
After what felt like an eternity of silence, I said, “If we don’t get married, I will move back to the U.S., and you will never meet your child.” This part, however, I blocked from my memory for over 20 years.
October 1989 – College Graduation
November 1989 – Wedding
May 1990 – Our son, Esteban, was born. I was 25 years old. His father was 23.
Marcela and Jorge, 1989, Bogotá.
Once the bliss of the wedding and the birth of our son faded, the reality of an unplanned marriage began to take its toll. We did not divorce immediately after that sunny day in Bogotá. We tried to make it work until October 1993, when I was in Miami visiting my mother and siblings while my husband remained in Bogotá. Over an international long-distance call, the day before my son and I were supposed to fly back to Bogotá, my husband said again, “I can’t. Please don’t come back.”
That was the moment my marriage ended. The beginning of my new identity had begun.
For years, I told this story only mentioning that my then-husband had left the marriage by phone—and technically, he did. But in my journey since 2012 of challenging my beliefs and revisiting my stories, I examined this moment from the observer’s perspective and not a protagonist. I saw myself sitting in his car with the positive pregnancy result letter in my hand, saying, “If we don’t get married, I will move back to the U.S., and you will never meet your child.”
Although he left the marriage, and at the time, it felt unbearable, he had likely felt cornered for years. His soul had been shouting at him for a long time, or perhaps it was simply that he didn’t love me anymore. Whatever his reason was, it was his reason.
Why did I forget the words I had said to him in the car? Why did I block that part of my memory? I believe I subconsciously did so to play the role of the victim without accountability. It allowed me to be the abandoned woman many saw me as—the single mother some assumed had to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Revisiting this story as the observer—without the emotions of the moment and without seeing myself as the victim—has given me the strength to recognize my role in it. It has also allowed me to feel compassion for the 23- and 25-year-olds sitting in that car on a cold night in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1989.
I have never felt more empowered than since I began challenging my beliefs and revisiting my stories as the observer. This process has allowed me to continuously reclaim my strength and value.
Have you ever revisited a past experience from a different perspective and discovered a truth about yourself that you hadn't seen before? How did it change your understanding of the situation?
In moments of major life change, we often feel like things are happening to us. Looking back, can you identify a time when you unknowingly contributed to a turning point in your own life?
Our identities are often shaped by our roles in relationships—partner, parent, professional. Have you ever questioned who you are beyond those roles? What did you discover?