I’m back!!! *cue Stitch evil laugh* Did ya miss me?

Anyway on with my musings.

This may be a me thing and a short post but do you ever just want to be unique?

So my name is actually Gift, in case you were wondering, and in the West it’s a unique name. In the continent of Africa and especially in the South where my mom worked it is not. I lived in the south, mostly in South Africa and Swaziland then I went back to my homeland of Rwanda. In those times I never felt that my name was unique or strange. But when I came to England, omd! I did.

“Gift, can you give me gift?”

“Present!”

“Parcel!”

“Delivery!”

Once someone in my primary school caught me on a bad day and I kicked him straight in the groin. He cried and said I’d kicked his broken arm. That was a lie and I had witnesses.

Violence aside my name caused me trouble when I was younger and even as a teenager and still to this day. So tell me why I get offended when I meet someone with the same name as me?

One time I didn’t want to tell these kids my name at camp because their friend had the same name as me and I didn’t like it. It was like the one unique thing about me was taken away.

Those two people that I’ve met in my life with my name were also African, I don’t know which countries they were from as I never asked.

But it’s just so interesting. I so wanted to be unique that even the name that I hated I wanted to be mine and mine alone. I even remember logging on skype and typing my name in to see how many Gifts would come up, a lot surprisingly and not from African either but from Thailand. I was surprised.

I don’t hate my name now and I am more welcoming of people with the same name as me these days.

But there’s things about my personality or skills that I have that I think are unique and then I find out there are millions of people just like me. When I realise that I feel sad that there’s nothing to differentiate me from them.

It’s funny that I’m like this as an adult when as a child all I wanted was to fit in or to not stand out too much. Or even as an adult I find comfort in finding that there are people who have the same struggles as me.

So it’s like I want to have people who relate to my struggles and I want to have people who are interested in the same things as me books wise or movie wise etc but when it comes to my personality, my skills and the way I look, I want that to be unique.

Why is that? Is that even possible?