There was a phrase I often repeated when my children were growing up, usually around the dinner table after one of the inevitable disagreements or difficult conversations that come with being an imperfect parent and raising four children.

I would look at them and say,

“Kids, all you own is your name.”

I don’t remember where the words came from. I never consciously created them; they seemed to arrive from somewhere deeper within me, and over the years they became part of our family.

At the time, I believed I understood exactly what they meant. I thought I was teaching my children that their reputation mattered, that honesty mattered, that integrity mattered, that trust, once broken, is difficult to rebuild. I wanted them to understand that while life may give us many things, our character is ours to shape.

It was a lesson worth teaching.

What I couldn’t have known then was that those same words had come to teach me.

What I didn’t yet see was the fear that lived quietly beneath my own teaching, a fear of not fitting in, of being judged, of not being liked or respected. It was a fear rooted in others, in how I was seen, more than in who I actually was.

Life has a curious way of doing that.

Sometimes the deepest truths arrive long before we understand them. We speak them. We live beside them. We repeat them to others. Then, years or even decades later, life quietly reveals what they were really asking of us.

Looking back, I can see that this has happened more than once in my own life.

Years ago, I chose the name Katherine.

Some time later, I was given a spirit name: Ahna.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand the deeper significance of either. The names came first; their meaning emerged later.

When I eventually became curious enough to explore their meanings, I was surprised by what I found.

Katherine means to act and live in a way that is pure and clean.

Ahna means favour and grace, to be of service and to live gracefully.

Whether one sees that as providence, synchronicity, or mere coincidence doesn’t really matter to me.

What matters is that those words have followed me quietly ever since.

They do not describe who I am.

They describe who I hope to become, fully.

I find myself returning to them often: grace, favour, pure, clean.

Not as measures of perfection, but as gentle reminders of the life I aspire to live.

Several years ago, I was attending a leadership programme at Harvard. On the first evening, I found myself in conversation with another woman in the programme. As strangers sometimes do, we skipped past the small talk and found ourselves speaking honestly about our lives.

I told her I was writing a book called Sincerely, Katherine.

She gasped and paused.

Then she said something I have never forgotten:

“If I were writing a book called Sincerely, Suzanne… would I be proud of it? Would I be proud of the life I’ve lived? Of how I’ve lived it? Of who I’ve become?”

In that moment, Suzanne’s question was no longer about her.

It became about all of us.

Every one of us is, in some way, writing the story attached to our own name.

Carl Jung is often credited with saying that “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who we truly are.”

I have come to believe that becoming is an act of profound humility.

It asks us to keep learning, to keep letting go of what is false, and to remain teachable to what is true.

When I was younger, I thought “all you own is your name” was about protecting something.

Today, I hear those words differently.

Our name is not something to protect as much as it is something to honour.

Not through status.

Not through achievement.

Not through the opinions of others.

Through the quiet, daily work of becoming.

Everything else is temporary: our titles, our possessions, our accomplishments. They aren’t really ours.

Even the roles we play will eventually pass.

For years, that fear ran quietly beneath everything I taught, and everything I tried to become. Somewhere along the way, without my quite noticing, it began to loosen.

What has replaced it isn’t certainty.

It is release, letting go of attachment, including the material kind, and a growing understanding of what actually endures.

What endures is something much quieter: the love we give, the love we receive, and the degree to which we allow the unique essence within us, our soul, to find expression in the world.

To live from that essence as fully as possible.

From love.

For years, I said, “All we own is our name.”

Today, I understand those words differently.

What is truly ours is our essence, our soul.

The journey and gift of a lifetime is to become who we truly are.

It’s all that is truly ours…the meaning of our name.