I didn’t get it as a kid. I never understood that one should take pride in their name, because in the end it’s all we really have to call our own. The only thing I knew was that my name wasn’t like the names of people who I grew up with. They had “regular” names. You know, the ones the teachers never took pause before calling role, or the names that no one ever misspelled.
It’s funny that names are given to us, but that we eventually grown into them and they shape our very being.
It all started when I learned to write ✍🏾
We had to write our names on our school supplies and I noticed one day that I didn’t like how my name looked. It looked weird to me, but it really got awkward when we learned to write cursive.
If you’ve seen the cursive ‘Q’ well it looks like a 2, so I really began to feel a type of way when kids started calling me Twincy.
I had no sense of pride and my ego was fragile, so my confidence started to plummet.
I changed my name in the 5th grade
I moved around a lot as a kid, so one year I decided to make a radical change. I didn’t know at the time that I’d be at this school for only a year, which in hindsight it worked out great, but I knew that I wanted to change something to make me more ordinary.
I played basketball for the church league and there was this kid named AJ on our team. Dude had skills on the court, he had personality, and he was cool. He was pretty much everything that I wanted to be at the time, so I stole his persona.
I started telling people to call me AJ. There is no ‘A’ in my name anywhere, but people went with it. Anyone new I met there was no problem because they had no frame of reference. They would knock on our door asking if AJ could come outside to play, and my parents didn’t ask questions.
Looking back on it now, I am wondering why no one ever challenged my judgment here…🤷🏾♂️
It was going great, I had this cool persona and all was right with the world. Then I moved again. The rise and fall of AJ was a short lived journey. It became too much to balance a double life at such a young age.
So, I went back to being Quincy.
Fast forward to a moment of clarity
I don’t know when exactly the revelation hit, but at some point it clicked that my name is pretty dope.
I think it may have been around Jr. high if I am being honest. Once I realized that there were tons of people with unique names from all walks of life, I began to be more comfortable with my own.
Another pivot point is the fact that I was given a name, but it’s more important the name that I make for myself. Defining the legacy of what my name is to be is solely on my shoulders.