Since I never met my parents, I never knew my heritage. Is it too late to, like, be that?
I never met my parents, and I grew up in a bad place. I didn't have freedom to use the internet or talk to people like me or really even people my age. I didn't learn my ancestry until this year, after they tracked down my birth parents (my mom is dead and my dad wants nothing to do with me, so no help there.) and I don't really know anything about it. I'm apparently a third generation immigrant from Romania and Pakistan, (grandparents), and both sides of my family are Roma. I know NOTHING about this. I've never even HEARD of them until now. Due to how I was raised, my identity as a person was kinda stolen from me along with an potential of the person I COULD have been, and now that I've been taken from that place too, even though it was bad, I don't really know what to do or who I am. Is it okay to start looking into information and traditions from what my grandparents would have known and probably taught me if I'd known them, and accept that as part of who I am? It feels weird, and scary, and insincere, since I never ACTUALLY grew up with any of that, I don't actually understand or participate in any of these rituals. I wish I did, and I would have, I should have, but I didn't, and I don' t want to claim something that isn't mine. I'm nineteen. I wish my mom wasn't dead.
@IIIcheshireIII Sometimes things and situations mold who you are in life. Sometimes it's things you can't change if it had a positive or negative effect. BUT that's only sometimes. There are things you can change and become. You can become the person you want to be or fell could have been. It's not too late. It's fine to look into your heriotage/ ethnicity/ ancestry as long as YOU are content with it. Be the person you want to be.