Cherish Your Name Like Gold

As a child, I grew up to be ashamed of my name. Danika, Dan-ick-ah. Boys would follow me on the school yard and yell my name in a way that bastardized it and hurt my ears, formed a chorus in the dark corners of my brain that fostered my self hatred. Dan-eek-a, Dan-eek-wa. It wasn’t hard to make a lonely girl cry when all she wants is to fit in, but in a school filled with names on top ten lists and Hollister shirts, that was never an option a poor girl with a weird name received.

Days turned to years with the passing sun, and I grew up. High school teachers would mispronounce my name during roll call, and I would sink in my seat with a tentative “here” while my classmates snickered, imagining instead I was sinking into the ocean. It was easy to make me upset, and kids love free entertainment. I began to tell people to call me Dan, to save them from trying to pronounce my name. When I moved into my first apartment for university at 17, I reinvented myself. Watch out everyone, Dani is new in town, and she’s here to kick ass.

At 19 I would still tense slightly at the use of my full name, of customers reading my name tag at the bookstore I worked at and butchering the pronunciation. I’d simply tell them to call me Dani. Until one day, a sweet woman with a walker and an accent asked me how to pronounce my name. I told her Dan-cik-ah, but it wasn’t important. She told me that she named her daughter the same, but in its original form, in Slavic, it is Dah-nee-tsa. I told her if she liked, she could call me that, it didn’t matter to me. I was so used to stripping my name down to the bones that I felt no connection to it any more.

The woman suddenly grabbed my hand and gave it a firm squeeze. Her soft demeanour hardened into a stern frown, and I could see something like sadness in her eyes. This woman who I’d never met knew in an instant why I was so careless with what I allowed others to call me.

“You listen to me,” she started with a voice that was quiet but firm, “you cherish your name like gold. It is all that you are and all you will become. Do not dim yourself because others will not bother to learn your name; your name means morning star, and you need to start acting like it.”

With that, she gave my hand one last squeeze, and left with the book I had chosen for her. I saw her once more, and she smiled and exclaimed “Dah-nee-tsa!” She was with her daughter.

It took me a long time to find a home in myself, to feel comfortable with these trinkets of interests and traits I’ve developed and display them on my shelves. On a random Tuesday afternoon in an overpopulated city, this kind soul found me and gave that withered up part of me the water it needed to grow. Every day for four years I have thought of her words, and every day my garden is gifted another drop of sunlight.

My name comes from foreign lips and is made brand new when spoken in different tongues. My name means uncertainty, the beginning to an unexpected story, two young souls becoming parents. A fragment of a memory from a young woman’s youth that was pulled from a dusty box buried in her mind by a wide eyed child with nails the size of rice.

My name is Dan-ICH-ka, thanks to my papa. A pronunciation he crafted to annoy my father stuck like superglue and became as natural as my own name. My name means fidgeting hands and bouncing legs that are begging to move. It means a chaotic and confused mind that is always in another world. Limbs that are ready to climb, hands that are ready to create, and eyes that yearn to see the world.

My name is filled with pain. It is also filled with strength. Pride. Endurance. My name started off soft, hesitant, reserved. Time hardened my name like cement. It is impossible to make soft again.

I used to be okay with people saying my name wrong.

Now, because of the kindness of a stranger, I realize that my name holds everything I am.