6

Pick Your Own

If you can pick your own name.  A name that fits you. A name you would prefer to hear called out to get your attention for the rest of your life. What would it be? I am no name snob that’s for sure. I like all names, I don’t think a person should be forced to keep their birth name or made to feel guilty for wanting to change it. If you discover your true name is something totally different from your birth name I say take that name and claim it as your own. It’s unfortunate that it can cost you an ass load to legally change it here in america though.

So obviously a day came in my life when I asked myself, “Who the fuck am I really?”  Through many years of adventurous discovery I found myself.

I am HOPE.

Although not the name given me by my parental units.   I am HOPE.   No joke.   I am the ever living,never letting go, always feeling, loving you, holding on to that last glimmer of……… HOPE.

My mother named me Tonya Hope. In my humble opinion Tonya was a trailer trash stretch of her imagination for a cool “new” name but the name Hope was a gift from the universe.  Yes folks I can love myself that fucking much.   My name was gifted to me from God.  It really is a meant to be kind of thing. Not everyone can say that. I have the uncanny ability to forgive, to love unconditionally, to move forward to a better future with a light always burning in the distance.  I don’t care how depressed I have found myself in my life, I was never void of some idea of a brighter future.  That is why I have always been a cutter and not a slicer. Gotta love that imagery.

Wikipedia says,

Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life. Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.^[1] Hopefulness is somewhat different from optimism in that hope is an emotional state, whereas optimism is a conclusion reached through a deliberate thought pattern that leads to a positive attitude.

Poem for Hope
A Hong Kong Proverb As long as we have hope,
we have direction,
the energy to move,
and the map to move by.
We have a hundred alternatives,
a thousand paths and infinity of dreams.
Hopeful, we are halfway to where we want to go;
Hopeless, we are lost forever.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Emily Dickinson

So what name do you give yourself?