So many times have I been asked ‘how do you spell that?’ I reflexively suffix ‘My name is Arona’ with ‘spelt A..R…’.
Having an unusual name is both a blessing and a curse. It singles you out from the crowd.
To be singled out from the crowd is itself a double edged sword. Throughout my school years I was subject to torment with rhyming nicknames. Each group seemed to delight in discovering a particular schoolyard slang that rhymes nicely with Arona. Each thinking they were the first, and each wrong.
The ‘rhyming thing’ still follows me, though these days it is rhymed with more adult things. Like Corona (with lime please!). Sometimes I wish I could change it — and I suppose I could now, if I wanted to. But I don’t wish to anymore.
I’ve come to love the uniqueness it lends, to wear it with pride. My name is my brand, one of the few constants in a life of flux as I persist in trying to figure out what and who I am.
It is a conversation starter, one that makes it difficult to hide. Searching my name on the Internet is incredibly effective — SEO? Never needed it! A blessing when I myself am trying to be heard. A curse if — as I often do — I’d prefer to go unseen, to slip into the crowd. A blessing and a curse.
The story of of my name is by now well worn. I understand people’s curiosity, but it doesn’t make it any less…well…boring…to retread why I — a young white Briton — bear a name in the ancient Maori tongue.
It’s also not a story I’ll tell now. Partly because I don’t care for telling it, but mostly because *my *name isn’t the point.
Second only to appearance, a name is the foremost that you learn about a person.
It is a part of who we are, and yet we did not choose it.
We may be able to change ‘what we would like to be called’, but we cannot change what others call us.
There are names in the sense of names that we possess, that are ours and used to identify us to others. And then there are names that others use to identify us. These are not always the same.
If words are weapons — and they must be, if the pen truly is mightier than the sword — names are thermonuclear warheads.