I never cared for my legal name of Payton. It was just something that people called me by, nothing more than that. My nickname of PJ was always preferred over my legal name though, I have never enjoyed my legal name. It always sounded weird to me, it never flowed well. The main examples of this are when my friends are talking to me and they just learned that my real name is Payton, and they start calling me that. It just sounds extremely weird to me. This is exemplified when they start to call me from across the room and they say Payton instead of PJ.

It wasn’t until I started realizing that my name should mean something, if it’s not my first name then it should be my last name that should mean something. I have a whole family whose names and reputations I need to hold up with my actions. I need to live up to my name by working hard and not giving up on the things that I love. Like baseball, I need to go out on the field and know that whatever I do not only reflects upon the team that I am playing for at that time, it also reflects the name that I was given and need to uphold.  It was once I started realizing this and actually started to embrace the work that I had to put in to get what I wanted that my first and last name became something that meant a lot to me. 

The first instance that my name became something important to me was when I was looking at the High-School sports teams for the first time and saw my name on that list. It was also when I first started getting recognized for baseball and started getting articles written about me and how well I performed certain days that I embraced my name and wanted to do my name right. I wanted this more and more because I felt like I was on top of the world when I saw these articles written about me and how well I am doing. These articles usually contain metrics from certain days that I went to a showcase or it’s showing what I did on a weekend when I exceeded expectations with the way that I performed.