Three weeks into NaPoWriMo, and something interesting starts to happen—the prompts stop feeling like assignments and start feeling like mirrors. Today’s challenge, inspired by Monika Kumar’s “Names and Nicknames,” asks us to sit with something deceptively simple: what we’ve been called, and who was allowed to call us that.
A name is never just a name. It shifts depending on who’s speaking, how they know you, and what version of you they’ve met. Some names are given with love, softened over time by family and familiarity. Others are shaped by circumstance, accidents, or even something as small as a photocopier glitch. And then there are the names we reject outright—the ones that never felt like they belonged in our mouths or on our skin.
In today’s poem, I trace the evolution of my own name—Richard—and the many variations that followed me through childhood, friendship, and change. Each one carries a different weight, a different memory, a different kind of permission. This piece is less about what I’m called, and more about who was close enough to call me that.
Because in the end, names don’t just identify us—
they reveal the shape of our relationships,
and the quiet boundaries of who gets to define us.
“All the Ways I’ve Been Called”
My name is Richard—
given whole,
like something meant to last,
like a door that doesn’t easily close.
But no one really keeps a name like that untouched.
My mother softened it first—
Ricky—
rounded the edges,
made it small enough to hold
in one hand,
in one voice calling me home.
My sister followed,
the same syllables,
but different somehow—
hers had laughter in it,
a kind of knowing
only siblings carry.
Then came Rick,
from smaller hands,
my nieces trimming me down
to something quick and easy,
a name that runs,
that doesn’t linger.
Some tried Rich—
like I was something to be measured,
something with weight or worth
I never quite felt.
But the strangest version of me
came from a machine—
third grade,
paper sliding through light and glass,
and somewhere in the copying
I lost the top of myself.
Kichard.
A broken R,
a name with its head cut off,
and Mrs. Labecki Kitchen
said it like it belonged,
like maybe that was who I was all along.
I carried that one quietly—
a glitch in identity,
proof that even names
can be misread.
Then New York—
new streets, new air,
and I became Ritchie,
with an “ie” that felt like motion,
like I was still becoming.
That one stayed.
It still stays.
And then there’s the name
I never claimed—
Dick.
Too sharp,
too wrong in the mouth,
like a door slammed instead of closed.
Except once—
just once—
from a voice I trusted.
Dickie.
From Jordan.
And somehow,
in the space friendship makes,
even that name softened,
lost its edge,
became something allowed.
But only from him.
Only ever from him.
Because names are not just sounds—
they are permissions,
they are distances,
they are who gets to reach you
and how close they’re allowed to stand.
And if you listen closely,
you can hear the whole life of a person
in the way they are called.
I have been many versions of myself—
Ricky, Rick, Rich, Kichard, Ritchie—
but Richard
still waits underneath it all,
unchanged,
unspoken,
still whole.
If you want to explore more voices answering today’s prompt. Step beyond this page and into the wider current of #NaPoWriMo—where each voice bends the world in its own way. You can find them here: https://napowrimo.net/
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