Identity Crises

      So over the past few years, I have undergone a slight name change. For all of my primary and secondary school life I was known as Danny. I never DREAMED anyone would call me Dan, mostly because I only knew a few Dans and they were mostly old (or older) men. I had a hard time imagining the name for myself. However, when I went off to college, it just sort of...happened. I wasn’t sure how to introduce myself. Danny, suddenly felt really childish but I still sort of stuck to my preconceptions about Dans and Daniel felt altogether too stuffy. I didn’t know what to go with. In the end, I wasn’t the one who made the decision, it was the people around me. Some people started called me Danny, since that’s how I introduced myself for the first week or so. Others (probably the majority) naturally switched to Dan. Soon I found myself not thinking of Dan in a stuffy and old way, but began thinking of Dan as me. I don’t have a problem with Danny, I accept that there are some people who just know me as that, and it’s totally fine.

      However, in Chile, I’ve had yet another identity crisis. Dan is not a name her. It’s a verb. It means “they give.” Daniel IS a name here, but the way you pronounce it in Spanish is more or less “Danielle” (dah-nee-YELL or sometimes even dahn-JELL) which I have a hard time accepting as my name. I know that they use “Daniela” for Danielle, but still. It feels weird. There are also those who call me Danny which seems better, but I know that in their heads they probably spell it “Dani” since that makes most phonetic sense in Spanish, so again, the female version. It’s not a massive problem and it’s one that I’m quickly becoming accustomed to, but it’s difficult when meeting new people to have to introduce yourself with a name you don’t recognize. 

     I think it’s because names are very important to people. Without even thinking about it, we find ourselves assigning so much meaning to such small things as names. It helps us to define people and to make them easier to access. It’s such a common thing, we rarely take the time to think about what a name really is and what they really do for us. Without names we’d have a much harder time telling stories, relaying messages, even thinking about people because names help us distinguish people from one another in our own minds. It helps us to categorize and to recall information. So when the word you use to define yourself changes, it’s not a problem, it just takes some getting used to.

     So as I adjust to a new culture, I’m learning to adjust to a new name. It’s one of those little things that you didn’t think you’d have to deal with, but comes with the territory of being somewhere totally new. A territory that, with each passing day, seems to have another life lesson for me to learn.