When I was born, my name was Daniel Gregory.

Before I was out of diapers, I was known as "Danny." Sometimes when my mother was trying to seduce me into doing something I was reluctant to do, she would call me "Dan."

And of course, in any legal circumstance, going through passport control or signing up for a credit card, I was "Daniel." I had fantasies of being arrested because I'd called myself Danny, two bald scowling cops in a small room grilling me on why I was an impostor going by an alias. Hasn’t happened yet.

My boyhood career plan was to become a veterinarian. And I thought it would be pretty cool when I opened my vet practice to have the initials D.O.G.

The problem was I didn't have a middle name that started with O (didn't have a middle name at all, in fact). So I assumed one.

At the time, we were living in Israel, and I decided I needed a middle name that worked in Hebrew as well as English. I flipped through the Bible and found the Book of Obadiah and made that my own.

I learned that Daniel means ”judged by the Lord.” Obadiah means “worker of the Lord”, and Gregory means “shepherd of the Lord” — so I figured I would always be fully employed, working in some capacity for the Lord. Despite reading all of the James Herriot books, I never did manage to become a veterinarian, but I still occasionally will refer to myself as D.O.G.

When I was five, my mother had left my father, Mr. Gregory, and had married an American named Mr. Steiger. Mr. Steiger thought it would be a great idea if I started calling him ‘Dad’ and calling myself by his surname. So I became "Danny Steiger" for the next couple of years. Then I went to live with my grandparents, who were both Dr. Selzer. People would sometimes refer to me as "Danny Selzer," but I was actually Danny Steiger, although by then, my mother was no longer married to Mr. Steiger, who had actually become Dr. Steiger, and she had become attached to a Mr. Kahan. They decided I should be known as "Danny Kahan." For most of my high school years, that's what I was called. Kahan was always a problematic name because people would pronounce it Ku-hahn, inflaming my inflammable second stepfather, who insisted it was pronounced “Kahn”.

By sixteen, I'd been Danny Gregory, Danny Steiger, Danny Selzer, and Danny Kahan. My identity felt like something others imposed upon me rather than something I owned. Which me was I?

When I graduated from high school, I decided I would take back my own name, and I became plain ol' "Danny Gregory" once again. And I remained Danny Gregory for about a decade, until I decided that “Danny Gregory” sounded too infantile, and that I should have a more mature name that didn’t kinda rhyme. I was about to start a brand new job, so I began introducing myself to my new colleague as “Dan” as in (shaking hands vidorously) “Dan Gregory, damned glad to meet you.”

When I quit that job, I also left that version of my name behind, and went back to being Danny Gregory again, which I’ve been ever since. But every so often, I'll run into somebody who will call me “Dan Gregory”, and I'll know that they met me in 1989.

When I meet new people who refer to me as “Gregory Daniel” or “Daniels”, I bristle a bit but I'm not sure how rude it will be to correct them. Sometimes I just let them call me "Greg" and leave it at that.

Names were just the beginning, though. The rest of me has kept shifting too. I’ve thought of myself as being English and then Australian and Pakistani and Israeli and American, identities that have morphed and changed.

I’ve thought of myself as a boy and then a teenager and then a man, a dad and a husband. I’ve seen myself as a student, an advertising guy, a creative director, a writer, an entrepreneur, a teacher, an influencer, an essayist. For half a century, I thought of myself as a New Yorker, and now, tentatively, I‘m becoming a Phoenician.

But probably the name I’ve struggled with the most is “artist”.

I very rarely feel comfortable introducing myself as an artist. A writer, sure, absolutely, but as soon as you say that you’re "an artist," people will say, oh, really, what kind of art do you make?

And then I suspect they’re trying to navigate around to finding out whether I make money as an artist, and whether I am just calling yourself an artist because I think it’s cool, or whether I actually am an artist. I think if I introduced myself as an accountant or as a high school gym teacher, I wouldn’t have that kind of a struggle, but being an artist is odd. It’s a job that people find intriguing, but also are skeptical about. I totally get that, but I think in the end what matters isn’t really what it says on my business card, but what it says in my heart.

And I’ve come to realize that despite all the other changes in my identity, I’ve really always been an artist, and it’s only now in my waning years that I feel okay with this promotion and this new name attached to me.

Danny Gregory, Artist. Damned glad to meet you.

Now, who are you?

Your pal,

Danny