My Name

When I was 33, I began introducing myself as Anna.

I offered a polite fiction along with it: It’s the nickname I’ve always used. Any followup questions were answered with just enough vague truth to satisfy curiosity and then we would all return to whatever we had been doing before. The small story kept everyone comfortable, which was exactly why I told it—because I still doubted I had the right, or the power, to insist on the truth.

I’m 48 now, and no longer need that story. I chose Anna fifteen years ago not to sound more memorable, marketable, or exotic, but to carve a livable distance between the life I inhabit today and the life that first formed me. My birth name remains on legal documents I haven’t bothered to change, but it no longer belongs in conversation. 

A Name, Loaded with History

Most people treat a name as an uncomplicated noun. They do not expect it to sting or to set alarms ringing in the body before the brain can translate a syllable. Yet language is never neutral. Over many decades my birth name soaked up every context in which it was spoken, the way smoke soaks into curtains. It became magnetized to every story anyone wanted to tell about me—too loud, too intense, too eager, too much and not enough in the same breath. 

On playgrounds it punctuated jeers. At skating it was a convenient hook on which other children hung their own insecurities. It carried a sexual violation at twelve, two stalkers, social exile, running away, attempted suicide, discipline that prized obedience over understanding. Eventually, hearing the name felt less like recognition and more like an instruction to brace for whatever came next.

Like a switch.

The switch did not teach me stillness; it taught me to read the room, scan for facial cues, listen for hidden threats…and talk—fast and loud. Silence was a vacuum into which judgment rushed, so I chattered to fill space, convinced that words might earn me a seat at the table or at the very least reduce how harshly I was rejected from it. But no amount of oration brought relief. By adulthood I could sit in a crowded room feeling like a hyper-aware chair decoration, watching conversations drift around me while a loop in my head looked for threats and rehearsed escape routes.

Clinicians now describe this cumulative effect as complex post-traumatic stress. It is what happens when danger is not one sharp event but a climate. The brain learns to scan relentlessly; neutral cues—laughter down a hallway, a familiar scent, the simple utterance of a name—can trip the same alarms as the original injuries. No amount of intellectual resolve cancels that reflex. 

The work of recovery lies in altering the conditions so your body can stand down and take a break. To me that meant distancing myself from the trigger. Still, distance from a name is tricky. Disown it publicly and you risk interrogation. Keep it privately and it keeps you. 

The Simple Truth 

I stumbled upon Anna almost by accident, because I needed a four letter word for a poster I was making. I loved it immediately. It felt weightless. Anna carried no family legend, no cultural expectation, no memory of being shouted across a playground. It was short, steady, easy to spell—the linguistic equivalent of clean air. 

Still, choosing a new name was easier than adopting it. 

I was surprised at how heavy a one-word request could feel, even among people who loved me. I’ve been told, kindly, that the change is “difficult.” I’ve been told, bluntly, that it’s “unnecessary.” The implied question lingers beneath both objections: Why don’t you just get over it? 

The answer is that recovery is not a matter of willpower; it’s a matter of rewiring.

Early research into CPTSD shows that survivors rarely find relief in a single therapeutic breakthrough. Healing is granular. It rests on ordinary, daily interventions that reduce the nervous system’s need to scan for threat. 

For me, Anna is one such intervention. The word is short, steady, free of history. It doesn’t haul my nervous system into the past. It doesn’t prod me to shrink, apologize, or prepare a counter-argument before I even know the topic. It leaves space between stimulus and response—the space where choice lives.

A New Normal

Trauma behaves like a forest fire. The flames roll through, charring bark, cracking rock, reshaping everything. Afterward, sunlight may hit the same soil, but what sprouts is new growth—different root systems, different canopy. Insisting the forest look the same ignores chemistry, time, and the fact that survival rearranges biology down to the seed bank.

My chosen name is an acknowledgement that the landscape of my life has changed. That the forest that burned in my childhood is not the one that lives today. Some charred trunks still stand; some seedlings thrive where dense canopy once denied them light. Naming the new growth for what it is does not erase the fire. It acknowledges survival and invites participation in the landscape that exists now, not the landscape one wishes was still there.

Resistance Is Not About Pronunciation

When I introduce myself these days, I say, “Hi, I’m Anna,” and nothing remarkable follows. New neighbours, colleagues, and casual acquaintances accept the name as they accept the weather—an unchangeable fact presented without ceremony. After fifteen years, almost no one I meet is aware that I once answered to anything else. They don’t ask why I chose Anna, because for them there is no mystery to solve.

The questions come only from people who knew me before the change. They lean in over the dinner table or the reunion coffee and announce, with a curious mix of fondness and claim-staking, “You’ll always be _____ to me.” The blank is my old name, spoken as a souvenir they feel entitled to keep. Sometimes they soften the declaration with a laugh, sometimes with a shrug meant to say no harm intended. The effect is the same: they pull me backward, past fifteen years of deliberate growth, into an old picture frame bound with chains.

On the surface, the insistence seems harmless—an affectionate nod to shared history. Underneath lies an unspoken premise: that identity, once witnessed, belongs as much to the observer as to the person living it. A new name punctures that premise. It requires the observer to concede that memory is not ownership, and that loyalty expressed in outdated terms is still a refusal to see who stands before them now.

Adopting Anna means acknowledging that the earlier version of me was shaped by experiences many would rather not contemplate—forced conformity, sexual violation in adolescence, chronic social exile. It means recognizing that those experiences can’t be willed away through optimism or a thicker skin.

That recognition is awkward. Our culture prefers neat arcs: suffer, triumph, move on. Complex trauma muddles that sequence. Surviving, adapting, surviving again, and eventually realizing survival alone isn’t enough. A habitat is needed—psychological, relational, linguistic—where the body can stop long enough to heal. A new name doesn’t cure the past, but it quiets one glaring siren so one can attend to subtler repairs.

An Invitation

If someone in your life changes their name, consider the possibility that you are witnessing trauma-informed self-care in real time. Legal remedies, long-term therapy, or geographic distance aren’t always feasible. A name, however, is portable. Carrying it—speaking it, writing it, honouring it—costs the speaker nothing and grants the bearer room to heal.

People sometimes ask what I have “against” my former name, as though I have declared war on a perfectly serviceable noun. Nothing. I am not at war with a word. I am at peace with the decision to stop flinching when I hear it. The name itself is blameless; what adhered to it is not. My healing cannot depend on the willingness of others to validate that truth.

So here is my final invitation, without fable or apology: 

I am Anna. 

The name is not a phase, a stunt, or a vanity plate. It is the new norm that I now inhabit, the cumulative outcome of the experiences that shaped my youth and of everything that now grows and forms my future. If you can meet me here, welcome. If not, the past is spacious; it can keep both my old name and anyone who needs it.

Xo

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Coach Anna Lang is a Personal Development Coach, writer and mental-health advocate based in Canada.