Let’s talk names. Do you like your name? More to the point: Do you remember ever not liking your name?

Despite the compliments of people whom I assume are only trying to appease me to their own nefarious ends, it has taken me the majority of my life to like my own name. My brothers and I all have traditionally Irish names, but mine is the only one you wouldn’t readily misidentify for any other national origin. In my recollection, the one that matters in this case, nobody in South Carolina got it. No adults, anyway. More teachers than not through middle school assumed that my first name was a typo on the sheet and would ask if there was a “Cory” or, worse, the dreaded “Roy.”

Part of my distrust of and slow-burning resentment toward my own name was due to that initial imperceptibility to strangers. Naturally, though, the only people who got my name right from the start were those coming to put me in line: parents, teachers, youth group leaders, and otherwise the kind of Hidden Valley Ranch Davidians that the white Millennial recognizes instantly, like strangers who don’t want you biking too closely to their mailbox. A truth universally acknowledged: kids do not like hearing their own name from any of these people.

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