The Name I Learned to Say

May 13, 2026

Writer: Reese Kizy

Editor: Megan Lennemann

I think a lot about who I am and how others perceive me. I try to predict which parts of me people will remember, replaying how my first impression on someone may have gone over and over. I worry about the ways I present myself. But there’s something that always represents you, no matter what you say. That is your name. How can just one word define your whole existence? How can it be the one thing people take as you, and you have no say? 

Growing up, my name was difficult for me to say. My speech impediment left me struggling to say “r” sounds, creating a major issue in pronouncing “Reese.” I always hated that I couldn’t pronounce my own name. Failing to say it with full confidence often left me wondering why I had it.

I dreaded the first question someone new inevitably asked: “What’s your name?” That simple introduction was never enough; instead, it launched a series of “I don’t think I heard you.” “Elise?” “Grace?” I was a shy little kid, and not being able to answer the most basic question about myself always led to embarrassment. If people couldn’t understand my name, how could they understand me? I began to despise meeting new people. 

I spent many years in speech therapy trying to fix my “r,” carrying the fear that each new person I would meet couldn’t move past that first awkward conversation of a repeated misunderstanding. 

Maybe it’s the fact that my speech impediment finally went away. Or maybe it’s the fact that after all those failed attempts at trying to tell people who I was, I only grew more certain that you could never fully understand someone just by their name. Looking back, I realize I’m meant to have my name.

Some people might say your name is just an identifier. But your name is the identifier. It’s how people remember you. Although you don’t get to choose your name, you can make it your own. You can choose to be kind to a stranger, to smile even when you don’t feel like it, to offer support to a friend who wouldn’t expect it. When people think of you, they will think not only of your beautiful name, but of the last sweet, genuine, purely you impression you made.

I tend to spend a lot of time obsessing over how others perceive me because of those trying memories, echoing a name I started to hate over and over with no success. But our names, and the experiences they create, were given to us to help us look beyond that one detail of ourselves. We are given our names to make them whatever we want. Identity is not defined by the name we are given, but by the way we choose to live within it and beyond it. A name may be the first feature people learn about us, but it is everything we do after that that gives it meaning.