Think of the first person that pops in your head when you read the name, “Miley”. Was it Miley Cyrus? If you met someone today whose name was Miley, would you think of Miley Cyrus when she introduces herself? We humans are associative creatures. We always seem to have the need to put a title on everything. It may be a name, a classification, even a nickname. Every day I write a name, it’s a label that defines me, a person, a personality, a whole slew of thoughts and ideas represented by four letters. It’s even at the top of this paper. But I see names different. I hope, and feel, that I define my name, not the other way around. I represent my name, a creative, spontaneous bundle of laughs, tears, joy, anger, love, lust, and most importantly, life. My name doesn’t matter. Who I am is. My name could be Gertrude, and I would still be me. And that’s a beautiful thing. All too often we (including myself) are guilty of hearing a name and associating it with a person, an encounter, a memory. My life can never be represented in four small etchings of graphite. No one is bound to a word. I have tens of thousands of names such as goofy, crazy, inspiring, dysfunctional, ambitious, frazzled, and unbound. It just so happens that my parents fell in love with a combination of letters and used that to define all of my other names. They knew on the day I was born that I can and will be so many things, that not even all 24 letters of the alphabet can define the person I am and am becoming. They knew that my titles, names, nicknames, associations, passions, slight obsessions and motivators cannot and will not be held down by any single word in any language in the world. And I’ll be damned if I ever let them try.