Yesterday, as I did some errands, I encountered a young woman whose name tag read, “Secret”.

We had a few moments to chat, and I casually mentioned that her name probably caused her some issues: If someone asked her name, and she said, “It’s Secret”, I can imagine a very problematic discourse.

She responded that it seemed to waste a lot of time. I understand that, having had to spell my name and spell it way too often only to see and hear it butchered afterwards, but her name had the luxury of being a simple English word.

I don’t know why she was named so. I like the name. We should all be ‘Secret’, in fact we all are, wearing different masks with different people.

Even so, imagination can run wild with someone named ‘Secret’. Why did her parents choose that name? Was she a Secret? If so, she has not been a well kept secret, and yet she seemed a well kept Secret. In our short interaction where someone could be easily offended, she wasn’t, likely because she had had the conversation so many times before. She was thoughtful in her response, demure, and amused.

She was probably also a little happy to see someone read her name and didn’t just treat her like someone who handed them stuff. All too often people who wear name tags are ignored, and it simply takes a moment to treat a human being as another human being. We’re all stuck on this planet, after all, despite some misguided thoughts of moving to an inhospitable Mars by some.

I imagine when it comes to her online privacy, having ‘Secret’ as a name is a little confusing to people who look at the world through the lenses of Big Data. “Is her name a secret? Did she just fill out her name that way so as not to be tracked?”

Maybe we should all be ‘Secret’, or variations of.