People tend to forget my name after meeting me these days.
It’s not always the grating “remind me of your name!”s, but the even shittier, quiet moments when I watch them dig through their brain like a dresser drawer, searching for the gray, nondescript Gildan hoodie that is apparently my name, only to realize they lent it to a friend and never got it back. They wince into the distance, avoiding eye contact as they do everything in their power to keep referring to me as “you.”
It doesn’t make sense. I’ve never met another Dia besides a girl named Diana who went by Dia (which also didn’t make sense). And still, I might as well be Brittany or Kelsey like half my graduating class—echoes of haunted 1991 labor & delivery units, assigned indiscriminately to kindergarten teachers and data analysts… capricorns and leos… metalheads and stamp collectors.
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My neighbor Jen is a nice woman in, say, her early 60s. She has a long, gray ponytail and small eyes that sparkle when she smiles. I’m not just saying that either. She has that glimmer you get from being a good person for a long time.
Jen adds a gentle, bohemian vibe to the block, all Chacos and linen and safari hats. Leaves hydrangeas and basil in mason jars with “FREE” scrawled on cardboard beside them. She drinks red wine on her stoop most summer evenings, greeting everyone with a reassuring ease that suggests you could knock on her door for a couple eggs if you had the 9 PM urge to bake cookies and found yourself eggless.
Jen thinks my name is Mya. Or, perhaps Maya. Or Mia. My-uh. I can’t correct her on this because we’ve come too far. She pets my dog. I’ve taken the free hydrangeas. We have been neighbors for three years now, and I’ve accepted Mya as simply Close Enough.
Jen represents my inclination to protect sweet people from ever feeling bad about anything in their lives. If some uninsured person hit my car and they were sobbing and apologetic, I would tell them not to worry about it. So surely Jen can call me Mya until one of us moves or dies.
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There’s this guy at the dog park whom I talk to multiple times a week. Lanky, bespectacled, early 30s white dude with a beautiful Australian Shepherd. His name is Matt. Matt does not know my name. And one day, he awkwardly hit me with “what’s up… marathoner?” The dreaded pause! I could feel the weight of his realization—that again, we’d come too far, and if he asked me now, it would be an especially bad look. So he called me fucking “marathoner.” Nice to acknowledge my accomplishment months after the fact, but so obvious. So painfully obvious.
I make sure to greet him with “hey, Matt!” whenever I see him now, just to really rub his nose in it. Bad boy!
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At work, all of our creative is handled by an agency in New York. We meet, at minimum, thrice per week, and are otherwise in contact every day, around the clock. Our agency/client boundaries are so blurred at this point that we *bear hug* when we see each other in person. We’re just a big corporate ass family!
The only other Italian person, who also has an overtly multicultural name, calls me “Dye-uh” in every meeting. Even after everyone else calls me “Dee-uh.” Even though “Dee-uh” is the Italian pronunciation and according to his LinkedIn, he is a “native or bilingual” speaker. Even knowing our relationship costs millions of dollars. Every time, my boss pings me on Microsoft Teams and says, “is he serious?”
You think you have an alliance, you know? Un fratello. But when it comes to a name in this day and age, it’s every man for himself.
His boss apologized on his behalf. I asked her not to correct him.
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For every bazillion people who claim they’re “bad with names” to skirt accountability for being awful, there is one who makes up for it.
My friend Cate who lives in Manhattan has this friend Anna. Anna is a visual artist who looks like the love child of Kate Moss and Gemma Ward at their respective peaks. Anna hasn’t posted to instagram in over five years. She doesn’t have Twitter, or TikTok. She just likes David Lynch. Wears vintage Fleur du Mal. And she remembers absolutely everyone’s name.
Cate and Anna are low key fixtures of the New York party scene. The couple times I’ve been out with them, Anna walks into a place and knows the DJ, his friends, and at least three other people sprinkled throughout the crowd. It’s a remarkable sight: the organic socialite, unsullied by money, power, or other suspicious motives (though she does tend to drink for free). Just a gorgeous girl with the kind of old school magnetism that makes you think, “damn, they don’t make ‘em like this no more.”
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I don’t know the psychology behind why we love to hear people say our names. It’s one of those flashes of narcissism rendered charming by universality, which feels a little sacred. (I try not to Google sacred things.)
I’ve always loved names and I’ve always felt lucky to have a unique one. Growing up, my mom would buy us personalized knickknacks, like magnets and Christmas ornaments. She’d get me Diana and black out the -na with a sharpie. It became a running joke to the point that my friends started doing it, too.
My dad was adopted, so I’ve never had any allegiance to my last name. Dia’s kinda all I’ve got. Like Prince if he was white and generally untalented.
When someone forgets my name, I blame myself for not being prettier, or more interesting. For not being more like Prince! I mean, let’s be real: when a girl says she wants to be beautiful, what she really means is unforgettable. It’s written in the shimmery lip gloss refracting light off her jewelry, the perfume on the back of her knees.
Clever trickery.
Tiny details.
What good is beauty if it doesn’t keep the beholder up at night, anyway? And what’s the point of having a cute name if no one remembers it?
Deep in the forests north of Oslo Norway there is a lake called Katnosa. On this lake there is a tiny island, no more than 4 meters wide. I recently passed this tiny island on a recent journey crossing the forest. Here on this tiny island somebody has fixed a small wooden hand carved sign which says Diama´s Island. I came home and the first email I saw was this newsletter. Well, I can understand your frustration. It seems that even here in Norway they didn't get your name right :)
It’s ironic that uncommon names are typically forgotten easily, while common ones aren’t. It’s almost as if our brains reserve parking spaces for the names we hear most often and all the others get a “lot full” sign.
If I ever bump into you in the neighborhood I’ll be sure to say your name loudly and correctly 😆