How Long Did It Take You to Become Yourself?

No one names their daughter Nancy anymore.

Hard to believe, because when I was in grammar school, there were three Nancys in my class. Three!

To avoid confusion, our teacher decided we would be Nancy 1, Nancy 2 and

Nancy 3.

I was Nancy 3...and to this day, I don't know why. Because alphabetically, my last name should have made me Nancy 2. But for whatever reason, I was assigned the number three, and I remember feeling confused, diminished and really hurt.

The teacher had ranked us, and I came in last. As if that weren’t bad enough, I already hated my name and desperately wanted to be called Judy.

Why? Because the popular girls had names like Judy. And in the peculiar logic of childhood, I thought that if I had the name of a popular girl, maybe I would become one.

It didn't work that way.

By the time I was heading off to college, Judy had long since been abandoned, but I remember my mother telling me that college was an opportunity to reinvent myself.

Reinvent myself? Seriously? What was wrong with the person I already was?

Annoyed as I was with my mother, the reinvention notion took hold, and somewhere along the way, I tried Nicki on for size.

Nicki sounded cooler. More confident. More like someone arriving at college with a "popular" past. But whatever I thought Nicki was going to do for me, well, she didn't. Another short-lived identity experiment.

So it was back to Nancy, at least until I started working in entertainment, where I was asked to change my name because my boss's name was Nancy.

Enter Robin.

Yes, for a brief period I actually called myself Robin when I got my first job in New York at a casting agency. Although Robin lasted longer than Judy and Nicki, once I left that job, I left Robin too.

Years later, when I was on the Madison Avenue bus, someone shouted out, “Hey Robin!” and I pretended to ignore it. Oh I recognized the person from my past, but I simply didn’t want to resurrect Robin or any of my other creations.

Judy never made it out of my imagination. Nicki had a brief run in college. Robin got a limited engagement in show business. Yet somehow I kept coming back to Nancy. But I often wonder how much of it was ever really about my name.

When we're young, we're constantly trying on identities. We change our hair. Our clothes. Our friends. Sometimes even our names. We're searching for something that will make us feel more like the person we want to be. Or maybe more like the person we think other people will want us to be.

Sometimes the idea that we should be different doesn't even come from us.

Someone tells us we can reinvent ourselves. Someone suggests we'd look better if we changed our hair. Lost weight. Dressed differently. Spoke up more. Spoke up less.

They may not mean anything by it. But somewhere inside, a question can take root; what's wrong with the person I already am?

And it doesn't necessarily stop when we grow up. The names just change...

Successful. Attractive. Important. Wife. Husband. Mother. Executive. Entrepreneur. Rich. Thin. Popular. Powerful. We collect identities along the way. Some fit. Some fit for a while. Some we outgrow. And some never belonged to us in the first place.

At some point, I stopped trying to rename myself. And something I never could have imagined as Nancy 3 happened. I fell in love with my name.

Today, I think Nancy is a splendid name. Not because it's less common than it used to be. Not because I've decided it suits me. It's simpler than that.

Nancy is me.

There is no longer the name I was given and the person I wished I could be. No Judy who might have been more popular. No Nicki who might have arrived at college as someone new. No Robin who somehow sounded more right for the entertainment business.

Just Nancy.

Maybe that's one of the gifts of getting older. You stop spending quite so much time imagining the person you might become if only you changed this or fixed that or had something you thought was missing. You begin to recognize the person who has been there all along.

No one names their daughter Nancy anymore…and that's okay.

Turns out, I didn't need a different name. I just needed time to become Nancy.