i always dreaded the first day of school attendance roll call. i hated every part of watching my teachers try to desperately say my name correctly, stuttering, mumbling, half heartedly saying “taina”. for many years, i took anything that started with T; i answered to tiana, taiwan, tangerine, and, my favorite, tina. tina came from my sophomore year chem teacher who gave no effort in even trying to pronounce it right, and he decided on the first day that “taina” was just too difficult, so he renamed me “tina” (but i'm not going to take anything personal from a man who felt no obligation to learn his students names, so he called us all by our seat numbers, like cattle, and got fired half way through the semester).
in the more recent years, i have caught myself referring to myself as “steff” instead of “taina" in my head, making it slowly feel like i’m completely losing the part of myself that i've lived with for the majority of my life.
i’m back at my mom’s for winter break and hearing “taina” everyday makes me feel like an imposter or like i'm inside someone else's body. i go months without regularly hearing my first name, and i often forget to respond to it when i first hear it from a distance. there is so much love and care that went into naming me taina. my mom knew as a small girl that if she were to have a daughter one day, that she would name her “taina”. when i was born she was working as a cadre member at UPR, the “Taino Warrior Battalion”, and my name pays homage to that time she spent teaching and mentoring the future of the army…and how much she loved every minute of it. it also ties me back to my roots, keeping the indigenous people of puerto rico, the tainos, in remembrance. and, to some extent, it makes me feel close to a man i never got to know in this life time, my father, taisi. taina has no correlation to taisi or samoa at all, but my mom used to tell me that he loved the idea of naming me taina because a part of his name was in mine.
when i got to college and joined rotc, “steffany” was my end all be all in cadetland. there has always been some strong attachment i have had to my last name. whether or not it's because having a first name as a last name is cool or the fact that it’s the last part of my father that i will ever get to deeply know and hold on to, who knows, but its become my identity; i don’t mean “identity” lightly either, i regularly go by steff these days, and i think it’s made me a better version of myself.
it was never a methodical decision. i didn’t wake up one morning and threw "taina", and the last 18 years, out the window, but "steff" came gracefully; giving me the chance i was hopelessly looking for after graduating high school. i do, however, remember the moment that i just decided to go with it…the moment when i decided that i was just over trying to get people to try and say my first name, when i had the perfectly easy-to-pronounce last name that was convenient for everyone. people ask from time to time why i do go by “steff” and i'll just blame the army and that sometimes that’s just how to cookie crumbles, but the small part of me does miss "taina" and knows that "steff" was just my effort to try and run away from the person i once was.
recently, i had just met a guy, and he asked me how to say my first name during our first conversation. i pronounced it and he just kept using it, over and over and over again, and i got slightly annoyed. i kept correcting and repeating that “i just go by steff”, and he replied with, “what if i want to call you taina?” I don’t know why, but that made me feel so guilty about the way i viewed my birth given name. it’s the same with my roommate, gabbi. last year, when we were first getting to know each other, she would call me by my first name. i would always ask her not to, because at the time, i REALLY wanted to disassociate myself with that name, and who i was when i went by it in high school, but she always refused. she would reiterate that she loved just saying my first name and how beautiful it sounded, so every now and then she’ll remind me of how lovely it really is by taking a small break from "steff", and calling me “taina”. i found myself liking that these people in my life were calling me by my first name, but i liked even better that they WANTED to call me by my first name; i guess, for the first time, my inner insecure-ten-year-old-self felt safe in the name that came out of their mouths.
it was never that i hated being named “taina”, the people i love and have loved most in this world call me that. my mother, my grandparents, my aunt, my cousins, my best friend, my friend group back in tampa, my first boyfriend, my favorite teacher, my first friends as a child….but i met all these people as someone i once was, someone i wasnt entirely proud of. when i graduated high school, i wanted to start fresh, re-invent and find out who i was outside of the small town i had grew up in. “steff” came at the perfect time, unknowingly and gently, i had found the person i wanted to be.
there was a trend on tik tok where you would put pictures of your “personas” with the names/nicknames you go by; i decided on doing the trend with “taina”, “steffany”, and “steff”.
“taina” was filled with pictures of me being the picture-perfect person i wanted the world to see me as, “steffany” had pictures of me in my uniform and doing some hooah and army-LARPing shots, and “steff” had the most authentic and outlandish pictures of me living my best life. a couple weeks ago, i was having a milkshake with ethan and we sat in chick-fil-a, laughing and going through my REAL cringy tik toks, and we watched the one about my names. all ethan said was, “i actually really like that video”, that small comment made me realize that all those versions of me still live inside me still. some days i'm more “taina” than “steff”, when i want to hyper fixate on getting perfect grades or looking a certain ways, and other days i'm more “steff” than “steffany” around my army friends that bring out the silliest side of me at the worst times (while doing something rotc related), but isn’t that the best part of work anyways? the people that make everything just that much more bearable and fun.
my ten-year-old-self would be glad to know that there’s people in my life now that want to call me by “taina”. at 19, i’m glad i got the opportunity to get to know myself better and revamp myself to be the person i always knew i could and wanted be. maybe my life will be filled with different phases of what name i go by. maybe in some years “taina” will come back and stick around, the way it once had from birth, or maybe i stay “steff” for the many years of life that have yet to come. regardless of what happens, i'm glad to have lived wholly in both names, and have bathed in the best parts that they have brought to my life. but for now, i just go by “steff”…but if you wanna slip “taina” in there very once in a while, i wouldn’t be against it;)
with all my love,
♡ taina steffany
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