Your Name

I have been thinking about changing my name for a very, very long time. Almost all of my adulthood.

First it started as a way to shorten the three-word first name I have to the one my mom added: Sai Ramya Harshini → Harshini.

The story behind how I got the name “Sai Ramya Harshini Busireddy,” or even “Harshini” for that matter, is written in “A Different Child.”

So Harshini became this name associated with me. I was always happy, and when people found out that my name meant happiness, they would go, “Oh, how fitting!”

Unbeknownst to them, it was me fitting myself to my name. A happy person, because I learned very young that anything but happiness was not acceptable.

A few times over the years, after people heard about the role I was forced to play, I was asked whether I ever thought about changing my name away from Harshini.

I would say, “Oh, it’s just what everyone calls me now. I like the sound of Harshini.”

Over the last three years, I started realizing how much of what I normalized as “just what everyone calls me” was my fear of being seen as ungrateful, disloyal.

There have been times when I step into a rideshare and people already assume my origins.

“Where in India are you from?”

“Tell me about what you like about your hometown!”

Those are not very hard questions for most people. To me, I am taken back into the moments I barely survived to make up a story of how beautiful India is.

And oh my gosh, it absolutely is.

It isn’t my home. I am an asylum seeker because of the harm I lived through, and the hardest thing about it is that I don’t have any hatred or bitter feelings about the country or anyone, really — and yet I am forced to keep justifying.

I used to cry myself to sleep wishing there was a way to peel my skin away or bleach it off, so I would no longer be boxed into something and keep being forced into it, even when I clearly said, “I no longer identify as Indian.”

I remember I was in an ambulance being rushed to the hospital. The EMT said something, and I was like, “Are you judging from my skin?” and he said, “Your name.”

I got really upset that day. Apart from having a severe medical emergency, I also had to deal with people who were very set on seeing me through the label of my birth country.

So as you can see, I had a lot of challenges with my identity my whole life. I kept trying to find a way to just make people see me, the me that I was.

I learned over the last couple of years that I no longer care that much about how people see me. I care more about how I see myself — what I feel about my own experience, and my own way of expression.

To me, I no longer identify as Indian. Associations with my life in India are incredibly triggering to me, so much that I was taking very deep breaths as I typed the last few paragraphs, while shaking.

To me, I no longer feel connected to the persona of “Harshini” that I so beautifully mastered.

To me, I no longer believe my name or my birth country is all of me, even if the world tries to make it so.

My identity speaks to who I am, how I experience life and myself. And all the labels, at the end of the day, are just labels.

In a world we built, with words we made up, associations we created, I believe there is enough room to make something our own.

So here I am, Elena Claire Foster.

Still fully me, with a sound that feels safer to my body, with my own take on who I am choosing to be.

I am using it socially for now, just starting yesterday (Aug 10). A few friends addressed me as Elena and I truly feel warmth all over.

I was challenged by someone yesterday: “What are you going to tell someone? They’ll hear your accent or see your skin and ask, ‘What is your real name?’”

You know something? I don’t think I want to spend time justifying to someone who doesn’t have a stake in my life and who doesn’t live in my body, when they are addressed or identified with something my body associates with harm.

“My real name is Elena Foster. Elena Claire Foster.”