You are not your name

The Two Words That Became You

One of the strangest things about being human is that almost everything you think you know about yourself arrives through language, and one of the first pieces of language ever given to you is your name. You are born without one. You arrive before the word does. There is already something here, breathing and moving and experiencing the world, and then your parents look at this strange little creature and decide what they are going to call it. They choose a word. Perhaps they argue about it. Perhaps they have had it picked out for years. Perhaps they choose it because they like the sound of it, because it belonged to a grandparent, because it has some cultural meaning, because they think it will suit you, or because they simply happen to like it. Whatever the reason, at some point somebody says, “His name is Jaemin,” or whatever your name happens to be, and from that moment onwards the word begins following you around.

Your mother says it. Your father says it. Your grandparents say it. The doctor writes it down. It appears on your birth certificate. It gets written on your schoolbooks. Your teachers call it across the classroom. Someone says it and you learn that the sound means you. Eventually you don't have to think about it anymore. You hear the word and turn your head. You see it written down and understand that it refers to you. The process is so ordinary that nobody notices what has actually happened. A sound that originally had nothing whatsoever to do with you has been repeated so many times, by so many people, in so many different contexts, that eventually you stop experiencing it as a word that refers to you and start experiencing it as who you are.

And this is where language gets interesting.

Because you are not your name.

How could you be?

The word came after you. You existed before the word existed. Someone else chose it. You had no involvement whatsoever in the decision. If your parents had chosen another name, you would still be exactly the same human being, but everyone would be using a different sound to refer to you. If you changed your name tomorrow, the thing that has been referred to by the old name would not suddenly disappear. The word would have changed. You would still be sitting there.

This is so obvious that it almost becomes ridiculous when you look at it directly.

Imagine someone pointing at you and saying, “Jaemin is sitting over there.” The word Jaemin isn't sitting over there. You are. The word is simply being used to point towards you. It is a linguistic signpost. It is a convenient little piece of language that allows other people to refer to a particular human being without having to describe the entire human being every time they want to speak about him.

And yet somehow, over the course of a lifetime, the signpost becomes the destination.

We stop saying, “This is the word we use to refer to me,” and start saying, “This is who I am.”

Then comes the surname, which makes the whole thing even more interesting because now we aren't simply given a word to identify us as an individual. We are given another word that tells us which collection of people we belong to.

Frazer.

Now you are not merely Jaemin. You are a Frazer.

And because everyone around you has agreed to treat this word as meaningful, you begin to understand yourself through it. These are my people. This is my family. This is where I come from. These are the people whose history I inherit. These are the stories I belong to. This is who we are.

You are no longer simply a human being with a word attached to him. You are now carrying the accumulated meaning of another word that existed before you arrived.

And again, nobody thinks anything particularly strange has happened.

Of course your surname is your surname.

Of course you're a Frazer.

But you aren't.

You have a surname. You belong to a family. The word is an identifier. It tells us something about the family into which you were born. It is useful. It is often important. It can carry history and culture and relationships and enormous emotional significance. But it still isn't you.

Then we start adding more words.

Australian.

Japanese.

Italian.

Black.

Jewish.

Asian.

Christian.

Muslim.

Whatever the category happens to be.

And once again, the same thing happens. A word that was created to describe some particular aspect of the human being gradually becomes confused with the human being itself. You aren't merely born somewhere. You become an Australian. You aren't merely born into an ethnic or cultural group. You become the category. You aren't merely connected to a religion, a family, a profession or a culture. You become the word.

And the extraordinary thing is that all of these words are true in one sense and completely misleading in another.

There is nothing wrong with the word Australian. It can be useful. It can tell someone where you were born or what country you are connected to. There is nothing wrong with the word Frazer. It can tell someone which family you belong to. There is nothing wrong with the word coach, father, author, runner, husband, son, or any of the thousands of other words we might use to describe a human life.

The problem begins when we forget what a word is.

A word is a word.

It is not the thing.

And humans seem to have an extraordinary capacity to forget this distinction.

We create a category and then behave as though the category existed independently of us. We create a label and then start defending the label. We create an identity and then become frightened when something threatens it. We use language to make the world easier to navigate and then become trapped inside the map we created.

You can see the absurdity of it when you strip the words away.

Take away your first name.

You are still there.

Take away your surname.

Still there.

Take away your nationality.

Still there.

Take away your ethnicity.

Still there.

Take away your profession.

Still there.

Take away your age, your relationship status, your achievements, your failures, your reputation, your personality, your history and every other word you have accumulated over the course of your life to explain yourself to other people.

Still there.

Nothing essential has been removed.

You have simply become more difficult to describe.

And perhaps that is the important distinction.

Language is extraordinarily useful for describing the human experience, but it becomes dangerous when we mistake the description for the experience. The name is useful because it allows other people to find you. The surname is useful because it locates you within a family. Nationality is useful because it locates you within a country. Ethnicity can describe a cultural or ancestral category. A profession can describe what you do. None of these things are inherently problematic.

The problem is what happens when the description becomes the identity.

Because once you believe you are the word, you have to start behaving like the word.

You have to protect it.

You have to maintain it.

You have to make sure the story attached to it remains intact.

You have to prove that you are the kind of person that the word is supposed to represent.

And now the language structure becomes almost identical to the structure of insecurity.

Something happens that threatens the identity, and suddenly the event isn't simply an event anymore. It becomes evidence.

Someone criticises you, and it isn't simply criticism. It means something about you.

Someone rejects you, and it isn't simply rejection. It means something about you.

You fail, and it isn't simply a failed attempt. It becomes evidence about the person represented by the name.

The word has become a character, the character has become an identity, and the identity now needs to be defended.

This is why I think there is something so funny about the enormous seriousness with which human beings cling to these two little words.

Your parents chose one word.

Then they gave you another word.

And everyone around you repeated both of them until you eventually forgot that they were words.

You became your name.

You became your country of origin.

You became your occupation.

You became whatever else the world has called you.

And then, having constructed this elaborate linguistic character, you spend the rest of your life trying to work out whether the character is good enough.

But you were never the character.

You were the thing the character was built around.

The word points to you.

It does not contain you.

And perhaps this is why the question “Who are you?” is so easily answered incorrectly.

Most people respond with their words.

“My name is…”

“I’m a…”

“I’m from…”

“I’m a…”

“I was…”

“I’ve always been…”

“I’m the kind of person who…”

They provide a biography.

They provide a category.

They provide a story.

But none of those things answers the question.

They answer a much easier question:

What words have we agreed to use when talking about you?

And that is a very different thing.

The prison was never the name.

The prison was never the surname.

The prison was never the nationality, the ethnicity, the profession, the family, the history or any of the other words that have accumulated around you.

The prison is forgetting that they are words.

Because once you remember that, something rather interesting happens.

You can keep the name.

You can keep the surname.

You can keep the country.

You can keep the family.

You can keep the story.

You can keep every word.

You just don't have to mistake any of them for the thing they were invented to describe.