The Confirmation Name and the History Books

When it came time to choose a confirmation name I was about ten, and I did not agonize over it. My middle name was already Michael. I picked Jordan. That made my middle name Michael Jordan, deliberately, in front of my whole family.

That is greatest-of-all-time mentality on the record at ten years old. I was not joking and I was not being clever. I picked that name because I intended to be the best at something, and I wanted the paperwork to say so before I had earned a thing.

The same years, I was getting bullied all the way through grade school for having a big head. That was not a metaphor, that was the actual material they used. I told them I would stamp my name in the history books. A ten-year-old saying that to other ten-year-olds gets you laughed out of a hallway, and it did.

What none of them knew is that I was already winning somewhere else. At the Boys & Girls Club they called me The Hitman, because a kid was beating grown men at pool and ping pong and not apologizing for it. I was not big and I was not old and I did not care. Adults would rack a table expecting to teach me something and leave having learned something instead.

None of it stopped the bullying. All of it made me certain. Ten-year-olds are not supposed to be that specific about their own future, and I was. I have spent every year since either working on that history-books line or getting reminded that I said it out loud at ten and never took it back.