I'm Nobody. Who are You?

Actually, I’m Theresa. Or T, if you’re a member of my family or a close friend. Mary Theresa if you’re a family member on my dad’s side. Theresa Mary Margaret Zimmerman Dowell if you’re my mom’s dad. Theresie-Weesie if you’re Cristina. There’s a whole slew of names I’ll gladly respond to. You can probably even make up a new one, and I won’t mind.

If you live in the country you’ve always lived in...if you work with the same people every day...if you are near your family and friends, you probably never give too much thought to being called by name, because you hear your name called out all the time. When you hear your name, you probably just respond without ever thinking about the intimate connection you have with that one word. Although you didn’t choose it and although you may not necessarily like it, it is yours and at some point in your life you became it. I am Theresa. Theresa is me. I can’t be anyone else. I don’t want to be anyone else.

And that, my friends, is why living in a foreign country can be really hard. When you move somewhere where you know no one and you can’t speak the language, you lose a very important part of your identity. You lose your name. People talk to you, but they don’t address you. Your name is lost to them before the introduction is even over. Here the kids refer to me as “Missus” or “Teacher.” Sometimes I don’t even get to be a single nameless person…I’m “one of the Teaching Fellows.” I remind them over and over of my name. I tell them that they can ask me as many times as they like. But they don’t. It’s not that they are trying to be rude; they just don’t realize how important it is, and they probably feel like it’s rude to make me keep repeating it. I know, because I’ve often been guilty of the same crime. If you do the same thing, trust me, the person would probably rather have you ask a million times than have you never address them by name.

On long days when I’m not even once addressed by my name, I remember being young and watching Cheers, not because I liked the show (or at all understood it), but because I liked the theme song. Perhaps it’s silly and sentimental, but it’s also true. “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came. You want to be where you can see troubles are all the same. You want to go where everybody knows your name.” Sometimes, really, that’s all I want.

But then there are moments like the one that happened Friday afternoon as I made my way up the stairs to my last class of the day. Aris, a student in my SAT class, passed by, smiled and said “Hi, Theresa.” I know he didn’t think anything of it, but I almost stopped right in the middle of the stairs and hugged him. I’m sure he would have thought I was out of my mind, and for a moment, I may have been. It was just one word, but it was my word. It was me. I was…I am somebody. I’m Theresa.