What's in a Name?

Identity. Connection. Solutions.

When the news of her murder first broke, Renee Macklin Good was simply a “woman shot by ICE.” Then she was a “white woman.” Next, a name, and some partial identifiers appeared: “Renee Good, mother of a six-year-old.” Her name was eventually billed as Renee Nicole Good and Renee Macklin Good interchangeably. Her name gave context for more details and stories of who she was: a poet, devoted mother, lesbian spouse — details that grounded themselves, and her, in our minds and hearts.

Photo by Marco Bicca on Unsplash

Connection

When we hear of victims of senseless killings, such as police brutality and gun violence, we chant “say their names.” Names hold power. They ground us in personhood. Sometimes they telegraph characteristics and stereotypes like gender, race, and religion: Valerie is probably female. Shmuley is probably Jewish. When we utter the name of a soul who was sacrificed to a brutal or useless cause, their life comes into focus, making their death more tangible. Their name helps us to relate to them as more than a character in a tragic news story. It helps us feel their presence and know they lived among us, to become aware of their heart and the web of relationships — parents, siblings, spouses, kin — who continue on and are now suffering. Sometimes, through a name, we can even sense that the person had a certain charm or feistiness about them.

The act of naming things is a part of HI (Human Intelligence) that brings matter into focus so it can be related to, digested, and better managed. In Vipassana meditation, you name and repeat the activity you are doing while you are doing it. When you are walking, you repeat inside yourself, “walking, walking, walking.” Then the mind wanders, and you name that: “thinking, thinking, thinking,” and so on. The act of naming brings the practitioner into the moment.

Similarly, correctly naming emotions allows us to connect with them and move through them.

Solutions

In my executive coaching, naming the problem is half of the solution. I am regularly hired when a team is in chaos. Often, their being stuck stems from their inability to properly name the problem.

Once an entire team was up in arms because a rumor was circulating that the leader was leaving. She wasn’t. But the rumor had grown without her knowing, and there were feelings of betrayal and accusations of lack of transparency even after the rumor was dispelled. The staff kept claiming they had lost trust, and the leader kept apologizing for the miscommunication, but they doubted her sincerity.

When I was able to give the leader a name for what was happening — panic grievance — things shifted. A panic grievance is a decoy problem that serves to contain heightened emotions that cannot be directly named for one reason or another. In this case, the company had lost their main client account, so there was a lot of company-wide uncertainty. Once the leader understood that staff was anxious and the source of that anxiety was not actually the rumor, she stopped defending and started asking questions that got to the heart of things: What is the most stressful thing about your job right now? Where do you feel things in your workflow have stalled? Once they started contemplating and answering the questions, the team seemed to forget about the rumor entirely.

Freedom and Bondage

My name, Blair, translates to “place of refuge,” and I take that meaning pretty seriously. But at one point, I thought my name was a deterrent to belonging.

In my forthcoming memoir, there’s a story of asking my guru for a spiritual name, which she refuses in a very trickster-esque, spiritual-teacher fashion. At first, I felt rejected, but then I realized: Blair fits me perfectly.

In the same ways names ground us in personhood, they can also hold us captive there. Recognizable surnames can both open doors and be a trap (just ask Ronald Reagan Jr., or any actor who’s tried to differentiate themselves from their more famous parent).

In her memoir Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton rescues a baby hare but wants to keep it’s wildness intact. Among her many efforts to do that, Dalton does not give the rabbit a name. The name would domesticate it.

Names can hold us hostage to identities we no longer resonate with. Transgender people whose original names are associated with their birth gender; refugees who were given a new but lifeless name by their new country, and victims of abuse whose abusers repeatedly used their name must change their names in order to align with themselves and others.

Location

Names are not labels, descriptors, or pronouns. They are deeply personal tags. The contacts folder on your phone lists your acquaintances, service people, and loved ones by their names first. They help us locate ourselves and others. When someone yells out my name on the street, they do not say, “hey white lady with the curly hair!” which, depending on how busy the street is, could be many. No. I have been found.

And that, depending on the circumstances, can be a deeply wonderful thing.

What do names mean to you?