Identity Crisis

Small disclaimer: In retrospect I'm afraid this post might be overly long and not that interesting to people who aren't me. But, as John Fox would say, it is what it is.

My name is Danny. You probably already knew that, and if you didn't, I'm pretty sure divulging that information doesn't somehow allow you to access my medical records.

Actually, that's not true though. My name is Daniel. But if you ask anyone at my office, they'll tell you that I prefer to go by Dan. So, who am I?

I've struggled with this identity crisis for years and it honestly does cause me an inordinate amount of stress. Sometimes I wonder why I couldn't just have one of those simple names with no derivatives, like Paul or something.

If I'm being honest, I like going by Danny best. As long as I can remember that's just who I've been. When my mom was teaching me to write my name when I was three, she taught me to write "Danny." And I did write it, over and over. My dad virtually always calls me Dan though, and when I was younger I just thought of it as an affectionate short-hand for Danny. As in, "Hey Dan, come see this!" To a degree that's probably what it was, but as I got older I noticed that while my mom, brother, grandma, and most others called me Danny, he would still nearly always call me Dan (on occasion he does throw in a 'Danny'). I sometimes think he would have preferred if I'd gone by Dan. And when I was in elementary school, I remember my mom telling me that I'd probably go by Dan when I was older because I'd just grow out of wanting to be called Danny. That was exactly what had happened to her brother, my uncle Dan, she told me. I didn't want to believe it at the time, but she almost turned out to be right.

When I was entering seventh grade, I was dying to be cool, and although I liked it, I began to think that Danny sounded like a little kid's name. So, now that I was branching out from the one home room class structure of sixth grade and meeting lots of new people and teachers, I decided on the first day of the school year that I was going to start going by Dan. I remember it sounded awkward as if first came out of my mouth, when Mr. Adams asked during attendance of second hour World Studies what name we wanted to go by. It felt even stranger as I wrote it on my paper, and for the first time since second grade not in cursive (another habit I decided I needed to drop that very day for a combination of practical and social reasons, this one stuck however). It would grow on me I figured, just like when Jimmy B. had started going by James in second grade, or when Donny started going by Don, I recalled.

And, slowly but surely, teachers, new student acquaintances, and even some people that I'd known for a long time, began calling me Dan. Even after a while though, I still felt a little unsettled about it; it just sounded off, hollow in a way. Plus, there was the fact that my longest tenured friends, and especially Owen, just basically refused to stop calling me Danny. I never told them to stop, and I'm glad they didn't. Because as my small yet close circle of friends started to expand, as I met new people through other friends, they also started calling me Danny from the get-go. This made it harder to let go of the name, especially because I was realizing anew that I really did prefer it. Here is where the great divide started.

By the latter half of seventh grade I was officially going by both names in different settings. And when those worlds collided, when I had a class with a close friend who would call me Danny, and we were in a group of students who called me Dan, it would get awkward. I could tell it would make other students feel unsure of what to call me, most insisted on calling me Dan, as Danny sounded more intimate, but then it made the environment feel more stilted and formal for everyone. That's still a big part of the issue through to today.

Why do I prefer Danny? Largely, as mentioned, because that's just always what I was told my name was growing up. But more than that, I feel like it suits me best. When people call me by that name, it sounds better to my ear, happier or something. A few months into freshman year of college, for example, a girl on my floor who I'd met at the beginning of the year, just said out of the blue once, "You know, you really are a 'Danny.' You're definitely not a 'Dan,' that wouldn't work at all," and I think I know what she meant.

Partially I prefer it because it seems as if I must have made a somewhat meaningful connection with the person if they're willing to call me by what is almost always considered a nickname, rather than the safe sounding "Dan." That familiarity is a double edged sword though because I feel like I'm putting up barriers toward people, preventing them from getting to know who I really am, if I tell them to call me Dan. Finally, I think I also like Danny because it's so much more unique than Dan, or even Daniel. I can think of only one other Danny I've ever been friends with, and I don't have a single facebook friend named Danny (while there are four Dans and two Daniels). In addition to making me feel more like an individual, it also makes recognition so much easier; there are so many Dans out there I often feel lost in the crowd when using that moniker. In college one of my best friends and roommates was named Dan, and if I hadn't gone by Danny, we probably would have had to just go by our last names, which I wouldn't have liked. (I don't mind being called by my last name, I even enjoy it in certain occasions, but I wouldn't want that to be my main identity among my closest friends).

While I did realize I preferred Danny though, I still couldn't shake the idea that it did, as discussed, sound less formal, more personal, and to a degree, even childish. As such, I started to make decisions about what I would go by in different places. In soccer, with guys on my team from other schools that I wanted to impress, I was Dan, despite there being two other Dans on the team. In church, where I'd known many of my youth peers since I was a wee tot, I continued going by Danny most of the time. At school, I would continue to tell most of my teachers and professors through high school and college to call me Dan. At almost every job I've had, I've been Dan. The lone exception was my second student job during college, where I was Daniel. Anytime I'm at a party though, or a clearly defined social situation, it's back to Danny. Unless I forget, at which point I feel weird going back and saying, "actually, call me Danny instead."

If I could keep all of these realms in nice little separate boxes, everything would be fine. Like most things in life though, rarely can things be kept so neat and tidy. I don't know if I've ever yet been able to keep one of these worlds totally separate from the others; the boxes, and thus my identities, always seem to find ways to bleed together despite my best efforts. It would take hours to detail all the specific times and anecdotes, but I'll share some of the more severe ones, the ones that have bothered me enough to make this topic actually worthy of significant discussion.

I'm not sure how much of it is me just projecting an expectation onto others, and how much of it is real, but one main reason I go by Dan in more structured settings is because I feel like people will be uncomfortable calling me Danny (and sometimes as well, I myself feel uncomfortable having people, figures of authority for example, call me Danny). I can tell some people feel weird using the name when they don't know me very well, even if I tell them to use it. At one job, a grocery store bakery, my name tag read "Danny" and I initially told people that's what my name was. One of my co-workers however, an enormous deep-voiced football player a couple years older than me, simply ignored all of these cues and always, from the start, called me Dan. I certainly didn't feel like insisting that he call me Danny, and it's not as if I dis-like going by Dan, so, "Okay," I thought, "I guess I'll just be Dan here." After that though I always felt super self conscious of my large orange name tag glaring at the guy whenever we had a conversation. My other co-workers followed suit quickly, and soon the only ones calling me "Danny" were oddly enough those people who were even greater strangers to me: The customers. (I'll forever enjoy one such memory wherein a 30 something African American male approached me and said, after glancing at my tag, "Yo Danny, can you hook me up with some bread?!" Dan just wouldn't have sounded the same). In any event, while I had long suspected this was the case, and had had limited evidence before, leading me to continue using the name in most classroom settings, the experience in the bakery sort of confirmed to me that some people and settings prefer the implied formality of Dan.

My identity at the bakery was also appropriately further fractured, when, a few months after beginning the job, the company got new name tags, and, without asking me, the Human Resources rep told them to put "Daniel" on my new one. This was done because, as she told me the day she hired me, she loved the name Daniel and wanted to name one of her children that. Then, despite saving both name tags, when I went back to work there the next summer I was given a third newer tag that read simply "Dan."

This problem carries over to my extended family as well. In truth I'm not super close to much of my extended family, with all its assorted uncles, aunts, and cousins. I see them a couple times a year tops and usually a firm handshake and a few introductory lines are the extent of our personal conversation. It's certainly a gradient and I'm closer to some than others, and with some of the more distant ones there's still a divide over what name I go by. Some for instance always send me cards addressed to "Dan" and call me as such, this includes, unsurprisingly my aforementioned Uncle Dan. My grandma and some of more closer relations always use Danny though. This makes it even stranger when I find myself writing thank you cards to siblings and signing and using different names on every other return address. It's exhausting, trying to remember "Who am I to you again? What do you like to call me?" This made the giant stack of high school graduation thank yous all the more taxing.

I've also watched, a little uncomfortably, when friends have tried to bridge the gap. The first major instance of this happened in 8th grade. I became friends with Haynes in 7th grade science class, shortly after I began going by Dan. In 8th grade though, as we became closer and closer and shared a lunch table with Zach, it got a little weird that Haynes was still calling me Dan. I actually had sort of grown used to it, and didn't notice that much, but Zach had not. One day a few weeks into the year, he just flat out said to Haynes, "Stop calling him Dan! His name is Danny!" I said I didn't really mind, but soon after he did start calling me Danny. I'm glad he did, and glad that Zach made the demand in retrospect. Over time I've realized I definitely like my closest friends using my preferred name, otherwise it seems like they must not truly know me yet.

Another place where this divide has reared it's ugly head is via my cell phone. When I first got a cell phone, over Christmas Break my freshman year of college, pretty much the only people calling me on it were friends and close family. Thus, I recorded my voice-mail message with this intended audience in mind. It's sort of tongue in cheek humorous in tone and says you've reached "Danny." I've always really liked this message and received compliments on it, thus, I've never wanted to change it. This has lead to some painful experiences where I've had callbacks for job applications (where of course I have "Daniel" on my resume) or other formal calls, and listened to people stumble through leaving their message after my rather unprofessional message. "Hi -uh -Danny." or "Cough, hmm, Hello.. Daniel this is ___." I decided the message was just formal enough to not constitute changing it, and thankfully, since the job I finally landed called me back and left two awkward messages informing me, in spite of my voice mail intro, that they wanted to bring me in for interviews, I guess I was right. (though in hindsight it seems an unnecessarily stupid risk. Mainly my strategy was to just always be ready to answer my phone during business hours but you can't always be there).

After writing "Daniel" on my resume and having the head of HR hear me refer to myself as Danny on my own phone, I was unsure if people would have a predefined idea of what to call me at my new job. So, I told them to call me Dan on my first day. But after a week or so, the receptionist asked me, rather nervously, one morning, "Do you prefer to go by Daniel??! There's a rumor going around you don't like 'Dan'?" Then others started asking me similar things, "We heard you like going by 'Danny' is that true?! It's okay if it is cause we already have another Dan." How these rumors started so retroactively, since it'd been at least 3 or 4 weeks since my interviews/phone calls, I'm not sure. But I told everyone that no, I wanted to go by Dan. I just couldn't envision going by Danny there. It would have been too weird, here in the most professional environment I'd ever worked in, where I'd be meeting new clients all the time. On top of that, my immediate supervisor's teenage son goes by Danny, so I always hear him telling stories about 'Danny.' Daniel would have been too awkward though. I think I made the right call. But now I'm terrified of a coworker calling my cell, looking me up on facebook, or seeing me in any social setting and finding the truth out. One day the dentist called my office to confirm an appointment, the receptionist answered, they asked for Danny I'm afraid. I cringed as she forwarded the call back to me.

Still, it's not nearly as bad as the one job where I went by Daniel. That was the apex of all this name related stress to date. It was actually probably the best job I've ever had, or at least the best job I could have possibly had while attending college. It was super flexible, related to my field of study, literally across the hall from most of my classes, relatively interesting, and had a pretty laid back atmosphere and great pay for a student. On my application, as always, I put Daniel, and when the interviewer walked into the room he asked me if I was Daniel, I of course replied yes. Normally, the very next question is almost always what name I prefer to go by, but not this time. I didn't press the issue though, I figured we'd solve it later. We did not. I got the job and on my first morning my supervisor Dave just kept calling me Daniel. I was really really nervous about starting this job because I hadn't used the software in over a year, so I felt too timid to correct him. And after a week or two, when I was feeling more comfortable, I felt like it was already set in stone, Dave and all the others were calling me Daniel. Again, I wouldn't have really minded if I had been able to keep this setting in a vacuum. But circumstances would assure this failed in a major way.

In addition to superiors, there was also one other student who had the same job as me there, she too called me Daniel. I never really thought she was someone I would be friends or otherwise associate with outside of work so I didn't really care. We both started in February and continued working over the summer after classes had ended. When summer began though, the office decided to bring in a third student to fill in some more hours and help complete the one giant project we were all working on. This student was a quasi-friend of mine. One of those people you sort of get to know because you have a lot of classes together (though we would grow closer as co-workers). He was in my major classes, where I had other longer term friends and thus went by Danny. So, despite hearing everyone else call and refer to me as Daniel in the office, he would repeatedly and always call me Danny. If I had gone by Dan it wouldn't have been so bad. But the huge phonetic and formal divide between Danny and Daniel was very apparent to me and it was excruciating every time he said my name aloud in the office.

The rest of the staff continued to call me Daniel for months, but finally one day the following spring, Dave called me "Danny." I mentally cringed so hard I'm almost certain it manifested itself physically as well. I'm not sure why it was so painful, but it was. Again, I guess it was just the huge divide of formalities between the incredibly uptight Daniel, and the freewheeling Danny. On top of that there was the fact that I felt like I was hiding myself from them using Daniel, and now they knew I'd been hiding myself and must ask themselves "Why why didn't he want to let us in?! Didn't he feel comfortable around us?!" All of this is, I'm sure, much worse on me than it is on them and far exaggerated, but the results on me are still the same.

Further, the female student joined the undergraduate geography club that fall, of which I was the president and where everyone, the advisor included, called me Danny. She stuck to her guns though and always insisted on calling me Daniel. I'm not sure why but again it made me really uncomfortable and self conscious. One day I ran into her at the entrance to a campus career fair as we were making name tags. I tried to alleviate some of this stress by joking about it, I asked her "Hmm, should I be Danny or Daniel today?" She, of course, told me I should be Daniel, citing the formal setting. I feel like that helped a little bit, but she, unlike Haynes in 8th grade or the way Frau finally did in the later years of German class when that place transformed from a classroom to a social environment, never bridged the divide.

The funny thing is, there are actually situations in which I do enjoy going by all three different names. While at first he did it to annoy me, and it did bother me originally, my brother started almost exclusively referring to me as "Daniel James," or sometimes just "Daniel," around the time I was in middle school. Eventually I grew to like it, and my brother continued using it, but now we were both aware he was using it as an affectionate nickname. In turn, all of his friends started calling me that as well and I've grown quite fond of the label. This largely continues through today.

I like going by Dan sometimes when people start building nicknames off of it too. Primarily "Dan the Man" which has been used by numerous different people in numerous different situations with varying frequencies. Mainly in sporting settings or with man's men; when they call me that I feel a little burst of masculine pride, I feel like I must have done something well, and more importantly, I feel like I've been able to build a strong enough bond with a person that they can call me by a nickname. One guy at my current office calls me that on occasion now and it always brightens my day a tad.

And finally, I don't think I need to detail further instances where I like going by Danny.

So what's in a name? Apparently quite a lot. In the early days of college I was pretty good friends with a Linguistics major. It's too bad we didn't stay close because I'd love to hear her perspective on all of this now, with a few years of formal education behind her. But until then, I guess this informal self analysis will have to do.