With a name you could distinguish me from an entire crowd and ask me to do something for you. With a name you could find out my entire past according to publicly available information. With a name you could find out where I live, what I'm likely to be doing at a given moment.

It starts at a name, and you could set a trap that makes it impossible for me to be a problem to anybody ever again. Why would I tell you my name?

It makes a brand I suppose. I instantly appear more personable because I'm willing to trust everybody, it shows faith in humanity. It makes it easier to imagine I'd love you, that I'd be a nice person to meet. Or that I'm stupid enough to not pose a threat to you, that I don't see the writing on the wall.

After I'm a brand I have to neither be an asset or pose a threat. Everything you could get from me you could get from someone else. But if I'm a brand I have to have something to sell, don't I? If everyone else is selling the same exact thing then I'll never sell a thing unless I value myself less than everyone else.

I'd have to be making a point of how worthless my entire niche is by doing exactly what everyone else is doing for less money. By that point I'd be like a crack whore that's whoreing for less crack than everyone else because that's my best plan for getting crack. (These allegories are getting out of hand.)

Okay, so I've got to ruffle a few feathers or else the only precedent I'll set is for how low a person can get. Why should you know my name? One of the only ways I can make this viable is if you don't know my name, but here's the funny thing...

You can't possibly know my name.

I just am, I exist. Someone else might say something that seems similar but they mean something completely different. Sure, in theory, you could point at my "I am." and go "That one!" ...but this is a realm of one hand claps. Only someone who can hear what you hear could possibly understand your signal.

If you're reading this to understand rather than looking away... you're tilting at windmills my friend. At some point you'll need to lift your head up from the map and look at the path that's ahead of you. I'm the spider that crawls out of sight. I could be the tingling hair on your leg or the brush of wind on your scalp, and I could bite at any moment.

But names like that aren't names we use in the real world. What you're probably looking for is what others consider my name to be. It would be silly and rude to call out "I am!" in front of my coworkers, they wouldn't know what you mean. They'd think you think of yourself as God before I respond, and then they'd think that of me. Why burden me with that stress?

Suddenly I'd be expected to do impossible feats by smart alecks trying to prove a point. I'd be burdened by allegations of narcissism, of being a manipulative cult leader. At the end of the day I'm just trying to get through the day so I can clock out and go home. I could really do without you complicating things by saying any of my actual names.