Katherine Repasky | assistant editor

“Hi! What’s your name?”

A routine question. So, it is a little odd how often I find myself struggling to decide which name to answer back.

Technically, I only have one name to pick: Katherine.

It’s the name on my birth certificate, which means it is also on my license, the list my professors use during attendance, my email signature and my resume. It is the name I purposefully choose to use when I want to attempt to sound like I have some big role or somewhere important to be.

At home, I am Katherine Anne.

Going by my first and middle name arguably sounds even more polished and dolled up. But, for me, those two names in combination are far too emotional to ever be professional.

My mom’s best friend growing up was named Katherine. They had promised to assign each other’s names to their future daughters. So, of course, my name was never a question.

Anne was my grandmother’s middle name, and my great-grandmother’s, too. So, of course, it became mine too.

My cousins have always called me Anne more than anything else.

Somewhere within all the cousin trips we took, all the holidays we shared and every Sunday as we spread out around my aunt’s dining table playing cards, Anne has become the part of my name that feels the most “me.” No one else really sees that version of me, which makes it feel special.

My dad calls me Kay.

I don’t know if there is some grand explanation for this one. Maybe, he simply never had the same attachment to Katherine Anne or to all the family history tucked inside those names. Kay feels a little more separate, like a name he got to choose too, and a name only he gets to use.

Kat is the name I gave myself.

When I took my first standardized test and saw my name was too long for the little boxes designed to fit each letter, I decided Katherine was too far lengthy, and Kat sounded cooler. I thought I would never use Katherine again.

I told my friends at lunch, and they accepted the rebranding. I am still Kat to all my friends.

I suppose this is the point of nicknames; they let our names change as we do.

Don’t call me Kathy.

I was never particularly fond of Kathy, but my book club always called me that. Maybe because there always seemed to be a Kathy in the books we read, from “Wuthering Heights” to “Never Let Me Go.”

They knew how much I loved reading and started to associate me with that world.

Sometimes getting a new name feels like a small sign that someone has been paying attention.

I haven’t heard Kitty in years.

Kitty belonged to a four-year-old version of me who probably could not even pronounce Katherine.

Every once in a while, I find the name written on an old drawing or scribbled on the back of a photograph in my grandfather’s script.

Kitty is too childish for a 20-year-old, I suppose.

I think we all spend more time than we would care to admit trying to figure out who we are.

Maybe some of the answer is in the names people who love us call us everyday.

Katherine Repasky can be reached at repaskyk@duq.edu