A chosen name’s got a lot to it. Most people inhabit their given names much like people inhabit their nature, their culture, and their fate, without too much second-guessing. And while there’s something to be said about appreciating what you’ve been given (and that it hasn’t been given to everyone), for as comforting as it is, there’s plenty of sad, dramatic, and beautiful stuff to say about rejecting it all—or about being unable to accept it, about being unwelcome in that inheritance, about leaving behind a home or an identity.

Leaving a place where you could have stayed, leaving the allegorical cave, has the chance to not just lead you to a more spacious, comfortable box, but open your eyes to the incredible freedom that’s out there… a freedom that exists not in flesh and blood, nor even in given options, but in the living ether of ideas. That the skandhas of creativity, of hope, of faith, of principles, of love can inhabit us gives rise to an uncountable infinity of possibilities.

While I can’t say I’m uncomfortable with my given name, Austin, no given name or inherited atlas could ever be the key out of my corporeal prison. My way out of this oppressive, oligarchical, brutish reality and into the world in my dreams doesn’t have a map. Nobody’s made this trek. It’s gonna take more than I have—more than anybody has. It’s gonna require gestalts and assemblies of things that have never before touched. I’ve gotta master my own tools and figure out which others I need. Reaching the fluency required to find my way forward demands that I reconcile dynamics, and answers to questions, that have so far been disconnected, as if (and including) bringing a bunch of lonely souls online where they can find community and build the majestic.

In that vein, I choose Reconcile.

The flipside of bringing disparate ideas together, which is also a necessary component of change, is that it entails conflict. It requires ambition and strength. And in my quest for that “something greater”, I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve tried to balance some complex thing I might not be strong enough to even hold at all. And I don’t know whether this will ever change. I can’t always tell whether it’s my principles and ambitions that have led me to hurt people, or whether it’s me just being a brash and flawed person.

Nicknames, too, were always funny and unsettling to me. They’re just more given names, names assigned by friends or coworkers or other peers instead of your parents. Though a nickname does a better job giving meaning to your relationship with those people, it belongs to them, not you. Well, I’m preempting that by choosing not just a name but a nickname. And it’s a nickname that plenty of you would have given me anyway: Wreck. A violent force, an angry monster, a raging inferno of ideology.

Knowing when to wreck and when to refine: an ongoing praxis question. One that I’m always weighing. One that my names will have me live with. One that I must reconcile.