What a Name Carries

My full name is Ashanut. It was given to me with intention, the way names are given here, carrying a meaning, a hope, a small instruction for the life ahead. And for a long stretch of my adult life I set it aside. I went by something shorter, easier, more convenient for other people’s mouths and other people’s forms. I told myself it was practical. It was, a little. It was also something else.

A name is not a small thing. It is one of the first ways the world learns to hold you, and one of the first ways you learn to hold yourself. When you shorten it, smooth it, translate it into something more swallowable, you are usually doing more than saving time. You are making a quiet decision about how much space you are allowed to take up.

I did not reclaim Ashanut in a single dramatic moment. Identity rarely arrives that way. It came back through small, repeated acts of insistence: correcting someone gently, writing it in full, letting it stand at the top of a page without apology. Each time felt slightly too big, the way a coat you are growing into feels too big, until one day it simply fits.

What I have come to understand is that the name was never really the issue. The name was a stand-in for a larger question: which version of myself am I willing to answer to? For years I answered to the smaller one, the one that took up less room, that asked for less, that was easier to be around. Returning to Ashanut was, in the end, returning to her: the fuller self I had been quietly editing down.

I think many of us carry a name like this. Not always a literal one. Sometimes it is a title we have not let ourselves claim, or a role we are growing into, or a description of ourselves we can only say in private. Founder. Artist. Leader. The one who decides. We try them on and take them off, afraid they will look like we are asking for too much.

But claiming what you are called, really called, at the level of the self and not the CV, is not arrogance. It is a way of stopping the quiet apology. It is saying: this is the person you are speaking to. Address her fully.

A name is not a small thing. It is a way of claiming your space.

Is there a name, a title, a role or an identity you are slowly growing into, one you haven’t quite let yourself answer to yet?