Your identity includes memberships you did not choose and absences you cannot easily explain.

You did not choose your family, your first language, or where you were born, and you cannot always explain the things missing from your history, the gaps, the absences, the reasons someone left. Identity is made of both, the memberships that were assigned and the holes that are hard to account for. Neither is a matter of preference.

You are not obliged to explain the gaps to anyone. Where they trouble you, finding out what you can is worth doing while people are still available to ask. And where nothing can be found, the absence is allowed to remain part of the record rather than a question you must answer.