Your Name Here
Your name is the mechanism by which you are addressed. It is a nonphysical part of yourself that is put into the hands of others so that they might give things to you, including things as simple as...
Your name is the mechanism by which you are addressed. It is a nonphysical part of yourself that is put into the hands of others so that they might give things to you, including things as simple as information, and so that they might attract your attention.
It seems straightforward, doesn’t it?
I call it nonphysical, but that’s not entirely accurate. First, it kind of makes people think that I’m talking about something with spiritual substance…and people get quite the wrong idea of how that works in the first place, thinking in terms of, perhaps, a nearly insubstantial ectoplasmic slime or whatnot. But sometimes nonphysical things are merely abstracted concepts, having a material existence only in the dimension of ideas. Second, your name isn’t entirely nonphysical. Your first name is and always will be your body—that thing that people can touch or tap to designate you as the topic or to get your attention—as long as you remain recognizable by your physical features. It can get a little complicated. You will always be “that person right there,” but you might not be, under many circumstances, the particular person who is known to someone by how you look at any particular moment, due to aging or some kind of disguise or perhaps a disfiguring illness or injury.
Your physical name can drift. Just ask Elvis.
If you think of your physical name in terms of “identifying factors” you might stay closer to the conceptual target. Fingerprints aren’t as unique as prosecuting attorneys like to pretend, and neither are the suites of DNA markers that make it into some of the same legal cases, but ideally these things would be features of the physical portion of one’s name.
The more you think about it, the more you might be forced to realize that your name—your identity—is a complicated agglomeration of not entirely unique traits, and they only identify you in combination with one another. Other people walking around out there might have your name or your face or your voice. The combination of these things, along with the ability to relate secrets that only a few others might know, are enough to increase confidence that you are who you claim to be.
In a society obsessed with ownership it is crucial to be able to prove your identity to others so that you can continue to have access to your own registered property, but that’s only part of the job. Your identity also includes who you are to yourself, and that’s even more important.
Most people’s identities, internally and externally, typically consist of a stack of overlapping categories into which they fit, or expect themselves to try to fit, or are expected by others to try to fit. These include (in the general case, to varying levels of accuracy) memberships in one’s family in a general case (usually identified by lineage-based surnames), in a number of national or geographical or regional or racial categories, in a number of categories based on familial duties to other members, in a category based on an occupation, in categories based on professed interests and hobbies and sports allegiances, in categories denoting one’s levels of compliance with various social norms (gender or otherwise), etc.
These categories can seem harmless, but they all indicate roles that constrain behavior. Every membership role comes with a list of things one must do and things one must not do in order to be and remain a member in good standing, and these roles must be prioritized because often the rules implied by these roles are in serious conflict. If your life seems chaotic to you, the chaos is probably based in a conflict within your roles and priorities, or perhaps unrealistic interpretation of what behaviors should be associated with one or more roles.
If involuntary removal or addition of oneself to one of these role-categories causes that kind of breakdown known as an identity crisis—i.e., “I don’t know how to act now that I’m no longer an [X], I don’t know what to do now that I’m a [Y], How can I be both a [W] and a [Z]?”—that’s a clear sign that you’ve let things get too complicated.
This is how name-calling causes injury: other people can poison your name, causing difficulty in how others address you and think about you. It can also cause difficulty in how you think about yourself. Sometimes we try on, if only very briefly in most cases, the roles that other people choose for us in order to see how well they fit. It’s a violation of a contract of mutuality to try to use a different name for you than the one you have given for such purposes, and therefore a sign of intentional disrespect. An attempt at defacement, metaphorically speaking.
So far this gives us two main categories of nonphysical name—the names you request that others call you—or the names that others give you that you accept—and the names you call yourself inside your own head. External and internal, respectively. Sometimes there’s some overlap, but these sets of names never match up completely. However, no matter whether the names are internal or external, it all gets expressed as roles and rules and performance and portrayal.
When people talk about “finding themselves” or “learning who they are,” this is the stuff they’re talking about. They’re trying to work out what names and roles apply and address the sometimes vast gulfs between what we’d like to be the case and our actual capabilities, to learn not only about what is achievable but what is sustainable. And for some reason most people think of personal identity in terms of what they can be instead of what they can do.
As a personal strategy, I find myself consciously trying to limit the number of things that I am or try to be. For instance, instead of calling myself a writer, I think of myself as someone who writes frequently. It takes the pressure off and prevents me feeling like a failure during periods when I don’t have much to write about or as much time to do the writing as I’d like.
If you’ve never done it before, perhaps it would be enlightening for you to make a list of things that you are, categories that you fit into or try to fit into, with maybe a separate column for those that other people try to fit you into. If you feel your life is chaotic and perpetually full of conflict, both internal and external, try thinning down those “I am a…” lists.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know why this topic is forbidden. This kind of self-management should be taught in grade school. It is clear, however, that it is in the interest of those with authority over us to be able to apply names and roles (and their attendant sets of rules) to us without us putting up too much of a struggle, to be able to encourage us to accept those behavioral assignments and migrate those externally applied roles to our own internal lists and maintain them ourselves. It may not be in the interests of teachers and parents and pastors and the like to inform us that we can choose which roles to accept into our own names for ourselves.
But without clear roles—even hugely negative ones—we tend to feel naked and exposed and rootless. Purposeless. The telling thing is that to some even the negative roles that are assigned to us by those who despise us are better than no roles at all.
All three of these components—your physical name, your external name, and your internal name for yourself—make up what is sometimes referred to in mystical traditions as your true name. I don’t capitalize it here as a matter of personal preference. They aren’t special. Everyone has one. But you can control someone if you know theirs. If you’re clever.
Once you know enough of someone’s history and context and roles and priorities, you can predict their behavior and begin to manipulate the individual by arranging events and circumstances—or merely via conversation, casting or reinterpreting certain situations and events into terms that will be handled differently according to the prioritized roles that they have assigned themselves or have been assigned by others. Also, of course, you can provide other names and associated roles and try to make them stick.
The ethics of doing any of the above is an independent exercise for the reader. On the whole I’d say much of that is less than fully ethical, but most people learn to attempt to manipulate one another from a very early age, unconsciously for the most part. Whether you use these modest revelations as a way to learn to do it better consciously, or to learn to stop doing it consciously or unconsciously, or just to learn to defend yourself from those who would try to control you, well, that’s all up to you.
Learning your own true name is a great first step to learning to master yourself as well.