What is Your Good Name?

They say you either go to India once and never go back, or you go to India once and never stop going. I recently returned from my third visit, and I hope not my last, so I am of the latter.

I always intended to write about my trip, ideas I had were – things I love about India and things I don’t love (my ‘love list’ is long, my ‘don’t love’ list, much shorter) – or how India has changed since I was last there 4 years ago (a kind of same, same but different vibe). But no, as it turns out, a month in India is resulting in me writing about my name.

How so?

Well, let’s start by saying things didn’t go according to plan (thank God, isn’t that always where the gold is?). Then let’s say the trip was…intense! India IS intense in the most incredible way – from the vibrant coloured saris to the incessant horn honking to the eye watering smell of vindaloo, it’s a continual onslaught to your senses 24/7.

Then let’s say I spent 5 days in a hospital in Kerela with a lung infection and an I.V. for company (anyone who’s ever been to India can imagine what that was like!)

And let’s just say whilst laying for 5 days and nights on a trolley with a sorry excuse for a mattress, hooked up to a drip, being nebulised up to my eyeballs, with a cocktail of anti-biotics, anti-inflammatories, steroids, and emotions swirling around my cells, I was blown wide open and pretty floored. (Not my first visit to an Indian hospital by the way, maybe I need to deal with that particular karmic pattern!)

But this isn’t a story about that…that’s a story for another time, this is a story about my name, and more precisely, how I came to re-claim it. 

Did you know that in India, Vicky is a man’s name? so when I introduce myself as such it is often met with either a little comedy or a little confusion, or both. When I introduce myself as Victoria, I am met with; “Ah! Queen Victoria!” Not perhaps an association I feel akin to, but at least it’s remembered and there’s no question of me being “Mr Vicky”!

And if you knew that about India, you might also know that when someone asks you your name, they will often say; “What is your good name?” The ‘good’ being a mark of respect and honour to you.

So, the more I chose to avoid comedy and gender confusion, the more I went with introducing myself as Victoria – a name I am used to using in my work life in recent years but much less used to using in my personal life. And so, as I was convalescing on a Goan beach, I began to reflect; when did I decide that I wasn’t ‘a Victoria’?

And I realised, at some point between being old enough to write my own name and young enough to know better, I clearly decided that ‘Victoria’ was too posh and not cool and was too big and had too many syllables for little me. It was too much, or rather… I wasn’t enough to fill its rather regal shoes.

Well, that landed with a thud in my heart, and tied in with a whole lifelong pattern of not feeling enough or feeling too much, or afraid of feeling less than or afraid of feeling more than - as Marianne Williamson so brilliantly put it “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Then, as I sat at the restaurant on the beach sipping a masala chai, I journaled about all the times I’d allowed myself to feel not enough and about all the times I’d been told (always by men) that I was too much. I felt sadness for that little girl who didn’t feel enough to be ‘a Victoria’ (for Victoria see Victory or Victorious!)

And then, let’s just say something magical happened. I’d been chatting to a couple on the next table, and at the end of the conversation, this:

“By the way my name is Joanna, and this is Marco.”

“My name is Victoria.”

“Oh I LOVE that name!”

“Yes, me too.”

Me too, me too…

Victoria is my good name.

I am big enough for it, fabulous enough for it, glorious enough for it and I celebrate my muchness!

It took for me to travel to India to learn about respect and honour for myself through my name. Well, they do say India is one of the most healing places on earth. I can’t wait for my next visit!