I never knew how to spell my middle name. As a kindergartener,  I would stare at my name spelled out, written by my mom in both print and elegant cursive. Later on, I thought of imitating that elegant cursive on many school trip permission slips, but they never made it out of the  hot-cheeto dust storm forming at the bottom of my clustered backpack in time to be signed. I still wonder to this day how a neat little name like mine could belong to such a messy person such as myself. I guess it’s true when they say never judge a book by its cover, or at least not until you actually read the book and see how perfectly the two compliment each other.

Sa’mya Monique Wilson. That is my name. A stolen name, or at least that’s the story my mother told me. “I stole your name from our cousin’s baby daddy’s other daughter,” my mother said when I asked her about the origin of my name. I find it funny that a name that I’ve found to be so unique growing up was borrowed from a distant cousin who technically wasn’t even in the family. I’ve never met anyone with the same name as me. In those same kindergarten days mentioned earlier all the way throughout middle school, kids always said my name was  “ghetto.” During recess we would sometimes talk about our names. I remember my fellow classmate Nakia saying, “Any Black sounding name with an apostrophe is automatically ghetto.” Maybe that’s the reason I go by my nickname, Mya. I have never understood why it was so hard for people to pronounce the “Sa” (pronounced “Su”) before the “Mya” or why autocorrect always had a different suggestion for my name. Growing up, I found myself wanting a simpler name. One of those names that you could find on a keychain at Disneyland or Six Flags. There was always a Sarah, Samantha, Susie, Susan, or Shannon, but never a Sa’mya.

In college,  people ask me why I go by Mya instead of Sa’mya. My answer varies each time I answer that question:  “It’s just easier to pronounce,” “It’s just a shorter nickname that everyone calls me.” Those are lies. The truth is simpler: When I filled out my application to Smith, the form prompted me to input a “preferred name,” and as I sat there in awe of the fact that I was even applying to such a prestigious school I entered “Mya.”  I wanted my peers to call me Sa’mya, but when I got admitted and my Onecard ID had “Mya” printed in bold letters next to the photo of my eager, smiling face, happy to even be admitted to college, my nickname stuck and from there on out I was known as Mya. But maybe there is poetic justice here, because, on the inside, I still am that little girl in kindergarten staring in awe at my name, at myself, and at who I am today. How could I ever live up to being Sa’mya Monique Wilson when I am still struggling to figure out who she even is?