Everywhere I go, I hear my name but never comprehend it as my own. I suppose I can’t ever do that with a name as common as Rachel. When I hear my name called in the halls, I don’t look up anymore because it is never for me. My name doesn’t hold my identity in the hollow of its hands like it does for everyone else. I let it hold the weight of every other Rachel I have ever known, giving my own significance to nicknames and hoodies and things that are supremely me. This process has broken me down into three separate people. 

At home, I am glass shards of my given name. My parents pick apart the syllables until they don’t sound sweet or biblical anymore. Rachel is morphed into Rach by my gentle mother, Chel by my oddball father, and nothing at all by my brothers. Sometimes I am empty space filled with love, dubbed twerp by my dad in all his eccentricity. Other times I am everything all at once, my mother tossing my middle name around as if it doesn’t mean my imminent demise. The one thing that stays consistent in my own home is that I hardly ever know who I am. It’s as if I’ve become muddied, only cleaned off when my parents shout for me. I hear the name they call me, and I think, Ah, yes. That is who I am.

At school, I am a whole new set of jagged pieces, but I like those ones better. I have few friends, but they are good and I love them; I know who I am with them. He calls me the Clark to his Lewis, two halves of a whole. Another friend calls me babe like I’m something precious, is excited every time she sees me without fail, no matter how long it’s been; she is my oldest friend. Every day, I am a new pop culture reference to my best friend and hardly ever anything else, which I say with absolute fondness. It is all for me. School is oppressive and overwhelming and disheartening, but there is nowhere else I have so many people I can have no qualms around. It makes my heart swell.

Where I work, I didn’t know anybody when I first started. It was like a halleluiah, a bright light from above. I was the only one with my name, and so that is what I was called. It was simple and formal and to the point, only used when needed. But the women behind the customer service desk are now as fond of me as I am of them; they call me Underage when they scan the alcohol I legally can’t, and honey every other time they refer to me. The girl stationed next to me at the registers calls me Janky after my car, and the boy who works in produce calls me short-stack. To everyone else, I am still Rachel, but it means something different there. It’s open-ended. I have the ability to make my name into my own, to mold it until it finally matches my identity, if that’s what I choose to do.

For me, names have never meant much. Other people are like planets, revolving around their names as if they are the sun. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. That’s how most people live, and names all hold unique meanings. The problem is, those meanings rarely ever reflect on the person. Someone’s name is chosen before anyone knows who they really are. My name is blanket-soft and holy, but I am black, broken lines and hardly God’s vision of divine. In its original German spelling, my surname translates to war, but I do not wield an iron fist. If anything, I advocate peace. Over and over again, I have learned that  you do not have to be who your name tells you to be. You can choose to be so much more.