What’s your name?
Name a burden.
Go ahead. For me, the name itself is the burden.
I thought of my name as only a burden, it was difficult for me to withstand being crushed by the/its gravity it came with/was surrounded by once it was given to me. My name is Belinda. If you were to search up the name first you would see its meaning and then you would see its ranking.
Beautiful.
Uncommon.
I absolutely despised my name. I felt a case of nomomisia, the experience of feeling of strong aversion for a particular name, for my own name. There were just so many things about it that I hated.
From a lack of commonality, I would worship the mundane names of the “American” girls during elementary school. The Emilys, the Sophias, the Jessicas, the Saras and the Hannahs. Something about their names seemed as if there were little stars twinkling around them, they came with ease. They had an entire crowd to share their name with, clearly as their names were the ones always available at the souvenir shops. Maybe it would be some hideous trinket I would never actually need, but that didn’t matter. I just wanted to see my name somewhere, to hold it in my hand.
Then there was me, Belinda. The way others said my name sounded so forced, rough, sometimes even confused in different senses. Linda? Melinda?
“Oh they gave you an American name huh?”
My name doesn’t fit my ethnicity. It is assumed that I was given an “American” name to fit the fact that I was born and raised in America. To fit in. To look American. To what ever that meant. Oh they couldn’t have been more wrong.
Even so, popularity wasn’t a problem in this community of mine. Rather it was the pronounication, the spelling. In our native language, be- isn’t a common character. Words like bee are elongated. BEEE-LINDA. If the E was too much to stress out, then it would be rounded. BA-LINDA. And that would be exactly how it would be spelled. On birthday cards, certificates and gifts. At some points the effort would be just ___’s daughter.
So maybe I didn’t have a popular name that was easy to say for some, okay I got over that. No one shared my name around me. I’m the only one. Just Belinda is enough, you don’t need to know any letters of my last name to know who I am. But after that, something else about my name changed.
From an excess of meaning I would demoralize myself due to the criticizing glances of the “Latina” girls during middle school. I didn’t go to the middle school assigned to my district. The names I was already so used to, the ones who were used to my name, they changed.
Belinda
be : be
linda : beautiful
Be beautiful.
Suddenly I had a standard. To me, beautiful is a very powerful word. A word that transcends to multiple dimensions. Intellectually, personality, spiritually, more than physically. It has depth.
Beautiful [byoo-tuh-fuh l]
Adjective: having beauty; possessing qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind
Of course as a middle schooler I didn’t understand what these dimensions were, I just knew it was more than being pretty. Beautiful meant you were more than pretty. But to me at this time, it was something I had to live up to. I had to live up to the meaning of my name. Beautiful was too high to reach. Pretty? Pretty seemed closer to reach. I could probably be pretty. I was desperate.
Pretty [prit-ee]
Adjective: pleasing or attractive to the eye, as by delicacy or gracefulness: a pretty face.
I was desperate to a point where it was wearing me out. I despised introducing myself because I knew exactly what they thought of me. That they lingered on the linda part of my name. I knew what they thought. It didn't fit me.
A moment of enlightenment finally struck me when I stopped letting others dictate me about my own name, my name holds power. I decided that I am an individual who is equivalent to the amount of power bestowed upon me by my name. I am more than a name, undoubtably it is a huge part of me, but either way I've gotten a conclusion.
I love my name.
My name is Belinda.
