Learning to Be Enough: What’s Behind a Name

Have you ever wondered when you began to feel comfortable being seen for who you are?

I found myself asking that question recently found myself staring at my name and logo – front and centre on my website. When did that happen? When did I become comfortable putting my own name out there instead of hiding behind a business name, as I once did with La Luz Therapy?

The answer, I suspect, has been unfolding for much longer than I realized. It is also a story about what it means to feel enough.

A name that carried its own assumptions

My father arrived in Canada in 1955 to see whether it was a place he wanted his family to call home. In 1957, my mother followed with my three older brothers, aged fourteen, eleven and five. I wasn’t born yet.

I don’t know exactly when or why my brothers’ names were adapted to sound more English. Perhaps it happened at school, where teachers, as they still do today, tried to help immigrant children feel more at home and make it easier for their classmates to connect with them. Whatever the circumstances, those adapted names eventually found their way into the class roll, test papers, and paycheques, even though our birth names remained on our passports and other official government records.

By the time I came along, I was Luciana, which I’d like to think was a nod to my two grandmothers: Lucia on my mother’s side and Anna on my father’s. Lucy became the name I used, but our family name, Toppetta, was another matter. It was often mispronounced, and growing up, I was conscious of how different it sounded from the names of my friends.

Then my two older brothers started their grocery business, carrying our family name, which has now been standing for over 50 years and continued by the next generation.

You might think I would have felt immediate pride seeing our family name displayed so prominently. The truth is, at first, it felt a little prickly.

People would ask me whether I was related to the owners. I never denied it, but sometimes their expressions changed when they learned I was. Suddenly, I was being looked at as though I must be wealthy or somehow share in the success of a business to which I had no connection whatsoever.

I was very proud of what they had built. It simply wasn’t my path.

It was an odd feeling to have a name I had once wished was less conspicuous become associated with something that attracted attention for entirely different reasons.

My other brother, a chef, chose to honour our mother in his own way, using her maiden name to call the restaurant he ran for many years.

Between them, my brothers had found ways to put our family names out into the world. I was still figuring out what mine meant to me.

The name behind the work

When I began offering Reiki, I called my business La Luz Therapy. La luz means the light in Spanish, and there was a nod to Lucy in the name, too.

It suited the work I was doing. It also allowed the modality, rather than me personally, to take centre stage. That was partly intentional. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with being so visible, and a business name offered a little distance.

Over time, however, my work grew beyond one modality or one offering. Books, personal growth journals, meditations, soulful entrepreneurial guidance and other creative pursuits began finding their place alongside one another.

I needed a home for all these different expressions of my work, a place where they could belong together without losing their individuality.

And what better place to bring them together than under the name that was uniquely mine?

LucyToppetta.com became that home.

I didn’t need to invent a name or find one that might somehow encompass everything I do. I already had one. It was the name I had carried all along.

Perhaps enough begins here

I can’t say there was one defining moment when I suddenly became comfortable being seen. It seems to have happened gradually, through experience, through watching my brothers embrace our family name in their own ways, and through gaining a clearer understanding of the work I wanted to bring into the world.

What I know now is that I didn’t give myself permission to be different until much later in life. Somewhere later in life, these things began to matter so much less than they once did, and I found myself smiling at my younger self. What was I thinking? All that effort to blend in, and the name I was carrying was never the problem.

I still believe we all have moments when we wonder whether we are enough. Enough of the right thing. Enough like the people around us, in the language we speak, the name we carry, the place we came from.

But being enough was never about changing ourselves to fit other people’s expectations. It is about recognizing what was ours to begin with and giving ourselves the quiet permission to carry it with a little more ease.

This November, I invite you to think about what you have kept in the background because it made you feel different. That very thing may turn out to be what makes your contribution your own.

A little something to take with you: each month, the readers of my letter, A Little Something, receive a page from one of my books to keep. This month it’s the I Am Enough mandala page, from my “Mandala Motivational Colouring Book for the Entrepreneur”, arriving in their inbox on November 1st. If you’re not on the list yet, you’re warmly invited to join here. Recent issues are also kept in the archives. Take some time to colour, breathe and consider what being enough means to you, just as you are today.

For anyone who has found their way into a world that spoke differently from the one they came from, in its language, its names and its expectations, being enough has never been a small question. You don’t have to hide who you are. Your name, your language and your story are yours, and because they are yours, they were always enough. You can carry them forward just as they are.