Don’t Let the World Steal Your Name
A meditation on personal identity, moral clarity, and spiritual anchoring
“We are diminished only when we answer to what we are not.”
A Vignette
There was a season in my life when I nearly disappeared. Not in the literal sense—I showed up to work, paid my bills, made the appointments—but inside, I could feel the erosion. Every meeting reduced me to a title, every hallway conversation shrank me to a role, every news cycle offered me a box to fit in: veteran, civil servant, bureaucrat, retiree, voter, “boomer.” Each label narrowed the field until I felt like a character walking across a page someone else was writing.
One morning, I caught my reflection in the window of a Metro train, briefcase balanced against my leg, and I asked a question I’d been afraid to say aloud: When did I stop being a person and become a category?
That question is why I’m writing this.
Because whether it’s in the hands of authoritarian governments, marketing corporations, or the swarm of voices online, there’s always something or someone trying to take your name. To shrink it. To sand it down until it fits the box they’ve already prepared. And if we’re not awake to it, we hand over the keys without noticing.
The Theft of Names
History is thick with examples. The Nazis tattooed numbers on prisoners’ arms, erasing names in favor of inventory. The Soviet Union buried dissidents in files so thick that their humanity dissolved into paper. McCarthyism thrived on lists—accusations scrawled beside names until they weren’t people anymore, just “subversive,” “red,” “enemy.”
Slavery was perhaps the most brutal theft of names in history. Entire peoples were torn from their homelands, their languages silenced, their given names erased and replaced with marks of ownership. It was the forced reduction of human beings into property, the deliberate dissolution of identity into nothing but labor and profit. Though that is a vast subject in its own right, it must be remembered here as the clearest proof that to steal a name is to attempt to steal the very self.
Indigenous nations in the Americas endured a parallel theft—entire cultures pressed into silence by conquest and assimilation. Children were stripped of their languages in schools that forbade them to speak their names. Nations were reduced to caricatures or vanished from maps altogether, their living identities replaced with stereotypes or erasures. This too was a theft of names, both personal and collective, and its echoes remain.
Authoritarian systems know the power of language. They know that once you strip a person of their name, you strip them of their story, their dignity, their complexity. And once they are nameless, they can be moved, silenced, erased.
The present echoes are obvious if you’re listening. Political rhetoric in our own time trades in labels: “MAGA,” “libtard,” “radical,” “illegal,” “enemy of the people.” Each one is designed to do the same work: collapse the person into a caricature, so that engagement becomes unnecessary. Why speak with your neighbor if you can dismiss them with a hashtag? Why wrestle with ideas when you can reduce a whole life to a slur?
What history shows us is not just cruelty, but efficiency. Stripping names is faster than debate, cleaner than empathy, and easier than responsibility. And so the theft goes on.
The Psychology of Erasure
But why do we let it happen? Why do so many of us surrender our names without resistance?
Part of it is normalcy bias—the quiet, persistent hope that things aren’t as bad as they look. We tell ourselves, It’s just a word, just politics, just a label. But labels are never just labels. They seep into the bloodstream until you start believing them.
Another piece is cognitive dissonance. It’s hard to live with the tension of being both complex and misunderstood, so we settle into the box that’s easiest. If someone calls you “Democrat,” “Republican,” “conservative,” or “progressive,” sometimes it feels simpler to nod and go on. Even if those words don’t hold you fully.
And then there’s the authoritarian pull—the strange seduction of belonging to something larger, even if it costs you your name. The chants, the slogans, the banners: they offer a ready-made identity, one that feels safer than standing alone with your fragile, complicated self.
But each time we give in, something erodes. Until one day, you wake up and realize you don’t recognize the reflection in the glass.
Faith and Reason’s Shared Ground
Whether you come from faith or reason, the danger looks the same.
To the faithful, your name is more than syllables. It is belovedness. It is the imprint of dignity that no power should erase. The name is what makes the soul unique, what ties you to creation itself. When you let it be stolen, you surrender more than identity—you surrender the truth that you were made to be known and cherished.
To the rational mind, the name is conscience and moral agency. It is what makes you a subject, not an object; a citizen, not a pawn. Without it, you are metadata, a file, a case number. With it, you are the thread of accountability that binds power to justice.
Both paths converge. Whether through the lens of spirit or reason, the command is the same: Do not give away your name. It is the one cord that ties you to reality. It is the signature on the contract between you and the cosmos.
Civic and Political Consequences
The theft of names is not only personal. It is civic. It is political.
Voter suppression does not ask for your name; it reduces you to a provisional ballot, a number in a system that can be discarded. Mass surveillance doesn’t see you; it only sees your clicks, your data, your patterns, filed into categories that determine your worth to advertisers and governments alike. Bureaucracy can flatten you into a case number, a docket, a statistic.
I spent decades in federal service, watching systems operate at scale. I saw how quickly people could vanish into acronyms, case files, or clearance levels. A man wasn’t a father struggling to feed his kids—he was “the claimant.” A woman wasn’t a victim of violence—she was “the subject.” I learned that systems prefer efficiency to humanity. And if you’re not vigilant, you start to prefer it too.
That’s why this matters. Because when governments, corporations, and bureaucracies stop seeing names, they stop seeing people. And when we accept it, we stop seeing ourselves.
Living With Your Name Intact
So how do we resist? How do we live with our names intact when the world keeps trying to take them?
I’ve learned a few things.
Daily practice. Write your name. Not just the signature, but the story. Journaling, silence, ritual—all of it is a way of saying: I am here. I am not reducible.
Collective practice. Tell your story and listen to others. Solidarity is built on the exchange of names, on the refusal to let anyone disappear into categories. Protest is a public declaration that says, We still have names, and we will not be erased.
Civic practice. Vote. Call representatives. Show up to community meetings. Every act of participation is a way of standing in the public square with your name intact, insisting that power recognize you.
The point is not perfection but persistence. To keep your name intact is not to avoid wounds, but to refuse surrender.
Poetic Interlude
Your name is the flame in the lamp.
It flickers, it wavers, but it does not go out.
No storm can steal it.
Only you can cover it with your hand.
A Parting Call
Your name is not just yours. It belongs to the people who came before you and to the ones who will follow. It is a thread in the fabric of memory and hope. When you let it be stolen, you weaken the cloth. When you guard it, you strengthen the weave.
So keep your name intact. Keep it when the labels fall like stones. Keep it when the slogans roar. Keep it when systems call you “case” or “number.” Keep it when the world says, You are only this.
Because the truth is, you are never only one thing. You are a constellation. You are a story. You are a flame.
And if we keep our names, the cage cannot close around us.
Don’t let the world steal your name.
Hold it. Live it. Pass it forward.
Further Reading:
I felt this deep in my soul. You wrote about exactly my experience. I lost my personhood to my nursing career. Leaving the American medical field was the best thing I ever did. I found my whole self and my name, once I left the constant grind of being a body on the unit.
Dino,
That really touched me. Thank you for sharing your light ✨️