Answering to Our Names
Each Saturday, I share a thought-provoking journal-writing prompt here on the blog. These weekly prompts offer a specific topic or question to encourage you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. You can answer them exactly as they're written, or let them serve as a starting point for a larger, more formal piece of writing. So long as you write something in response, anything goes. But by giving yourself a specific focus, you can delve deeper into your writing and uncover new insights along the way. Feel free to personalize the prompt and make it entirely your own.
This week, I want to write about names.
Before we could walk, before we could choose a single thing about ourselves, someone chose a name for us—and we've been answering to it ever since. But a name is never just one word. Over a lifetime we collect a whole chorus of them: nicknames and pet names, titles and labels, the names strangers get wrong and the names only one person was ever allowed to use. Some fit us like a favorite sweater. Some we've spent years trying to shrug off. And some are so tangled up with a certain voice, a certain kitchen, a certain era of our lives that hearing them spoken aloud can undo us completely. This week, let's write our way through the names we've answered to.
Use these questions as starting points for your journal entry:
- Begin at the beginning. Do you know the story of how you got your name? Who chose it, and why? Were you named after someone—a relative, a saint, a song, a character in a book? If you don't know the story, write about the not-knowing. And tell the truth: have you loved your name, fought with it, grown into it, or made an uneasy peace?
- Call the roll. Make a list of every name you've ever answered to—childhood nicknames, family shorthand, school-yard taunts, work titles, usernames, endearments. Then choose the one that carries the most weight and write about the person you were when it belonged to you.
- Listen for one voice. Is there a particular way someone said your name that you can still hear? Your name in your mother's mouth, hollered up the stairs. Your name whispered by someone who loved you. Your name spoken by someone who is gone now. Write about what it does to you, hearing it that way in memory.
- Consider the labels. Beyond our given names, the world is quick to name us: the smart one, the quiet one, the difficult one, the strong one. Which labels were pinned on you that never truly fit? Which have you quietly unpinned and set down? Write about the difference between what you've been called and who you are.
- Name yourself. If you could choose a secret name for this exact season of your life—a name no one else would ever use, one that captures who you are becoming rather than who you've been—what would it be? Invent it if you have to. Then write about why it fits, and what it might feel like to answer to it.
Take one of these prompts, or weave them all together. Or simply write your own name at the top of a blank page and follow wherever it leads. You might let the art images guide you, too. So long as you're writing about the names you've carried, anything goes.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required—just your creativity. 🌻
