Call Me by the Name I Chose

Edgar: The Name Given to Me

My legal name is Edgar. I was named after Edgar Mortiz, a well-known Filipino actor and singer who was a major teen star the year I was born, 1971.

For the first several years of my life, Edgar was what people called me outside our home, in attendance in elementary school, on report cards, certificates, and anything that needed my official identity on it. After elementary school, though, it slowly disappeared from everyday conversation. These days almost nobody calls me Edgar unless they’re reading it off a form, checking my ID, or knew me from a very early chapter of my life. When someone calls out “Edgar” in a waiting room, it genuinely takes me a second to register that they mean me.

Edgar is legally still mine. It just isn’t really the name I recognize myself by anymore.

But it tells me something important about names: before we ever learn to introduce ourselves, someone else has already begun the story for us. A name can be a small record of the world into which a person was born, of what a family admired, remembered, hoped for, or simply liked at the time.

Bong: The Name of Home

At home I was Bong. My mother told me she named me after Bongbong Marcos, son of the Philippine president at the time, who many years later would become president of the Philippines himself and get called PBBM (President Bongbong Marcos). But inside our family the name never felt political. Bong just meant me. It’s what my parents called when food was ready, what relatives used at gatherings, how people in our subdivision, the residential neighborhood we lived in, and church knew me.

Even now, when someone calls me Bong, I immediately know something about how we’re connected. It’s familiarity. It belongs to people who knew me before the résumé, before any titles, before the book and the talks and the website, before I had accomplished anything that needed explaining.

Bong is the name of home. It carries childhood, family, faith, and the feeling of being known without having to introduce yourself. In a family, and perhaps especially in a relational culture like ours, identity is rarely just about the individual. You are also someone’s child, sibling, cousin, neighbor, classmate, churchmate. Hearing “Bong” reminds me that part of who I am has always lived in other people’s memories of me.

Legs: The Name of Belonging

When I got to Marist School, then a Catholic all-boys school in Metro Manila, I walked into a different naming culture entirely. The school is co-educational today, but in the years I was there, it was still an all-boys environment with its own particular rhythms, rituals, and ways of belonging. Students mostly called each other by surname, usually shortened into something you could shout across a corridor or a basketball court. Legaspi became Legs.

I’m sure other Legaspis somewhere got called that too, but in our batch, I was Legs. Nobody’s parent picked that name, and nobody wrote it on a document. It just came out of the group, the way most school nicknames do. Someone uses it once, other people repeat it, and eventually it’s part of the shared vocabulary.

Legs belonged to adolescence, to barkada, the Filipino word for your close circle of friends, to jokes, awkwardness, and figuring out where I fit among peers. The nickname mattered precisely because I had not invented it. It was given to me by people whose acceptance mattered to the boy I was becoming.

When someone calls me Legs today, I already know which door into my past just opened, and I’m bracing myself for an old classmate and an embarrassing story, probably both.

The Day I Found Ned

Sometime during high school I came across a book in the library called The Book of Names. Naturally I looked up Edgar. The entry said Edgar had a diminutive, Ned, and associated the name with riches and prosperity. I remember thinking, that sounds promising. Maybe calling myself that would turn into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

I wasn’t making some deep statement about identity at that age. I just liked the name. It was short, distinctive, and came with a meaning I wanted to claim for myself.

I had already decided that when I got to college, I would introduce myself as Ned.

The Name I Chose

I’ve been going by Ned for close to forty years now. What started as a teenager’s experiment eventually became the name attached to nearly my entire adult life.

When I transferred to the University of the Philippines, the country’s national university, I stayed in communication, the field I had found instead of the pre-med track my mother had originally hoped I would take. I built a thirty-year career in international media, became an executive and creative leader, and for a long stretch was known as Sir Ned. In many Philippine workplaces, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are commonly used as respectful forms of address, especially for supervisors, teachers, and senior colleagues.

After I retired, I lost the professional identity I had spent decades building and had to figure out who I was without the company and the title that had defined me for so long. I went back to school. I became a Cultural Intelligence Fellow, joining an international community that applies cultural intelligence to different professional fields. I wrote a book, started teaching, and found myself speaking in classrooms, conference halls, hospitals, and embassies about culture and connection.

Maybe the prophecy did fulfill itself, just not exactly the way I pictured it as a teenager flipping through a library book. The riches weren’t only financial. They came as stories, people, places, lessons, and relationships. Prosperity turned out to mean getting to build something meaningful out of everything I’d lived and learned.

When Ned Became Nedlegs

By the early 2000s, Yahoo had become one of the main gateways to the internet. When I created an email address and online username, I decided to combine the name I had chosen, Ned, with Legs, the nickname my classmates had given me in high school.

That was how Nedlegs was born. At first, it was simply a practical digital identity. But the name eventually came to mean more.

Ned represented agency, the name I had chosen for myself. Legs represented belonging, the name other people had given me and kept alive through friendship. Put together, Nedlegs held both: the person I wanted to become and the communities that had already helped make me who I was.

Years later, when I finally built a company around the work and ideas I wanted to carry into the next chapter of my life, I used the same name: Nedlegs Incorporated. The business came much later. The name came first, out of a teenager’s choice and an old circle of friends.

There is an irony in that digital name that I only understand now. The early internet felt like a place where you could invent yourself almost from scratch. You could sit at a keyboard and decide what the world would call you. Yet even in the name I assembled for myself, something inherited had already slipped in. Legs came from Legaspi. Choice had carried history with it.

Why I Write LEGASPI in All Caps

There is one more detail in my name that people sometimes notice. In much of my public and professional work, I write it as Ned LEGASPI, with my surname in capital letters.

That habit began in 2006, when I started studying French. As I encountered more French names in books, lessons, correspondence, and conversations, I noticed that surnames were often written in capital letters. Some of my language partners in France explained that this made it easier to distinguish the family name from the given name, particularly because some names could plausibly function as either.

I liked the clarity of it. Eventually, I started writing my own surname the same way: LEGASPI.

But the longer I carried the name that way, the more complicated it became.

Whenever I traveled in Spain and registered at a hotel, something curious would often happen. A receptionist would look at my surname, look back at me, and tell me that they recognized it. In Spain, however, they knew it more commonly as Legazpi, with a z instead of an s. It was a small moment of recognition, almost always warm and friendly, yet it gradually began to carry another feeling for me too.

Legazpi is a municipality in Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country of northern Spain. The name also carries an unmistakable connection to Philippine history. Miguel López de Legazpi, the Spanish navigator and colonial administrator who became the first Governor-General of the Philippines, was born in Zumarraga, also in Gipuzkoa. His surname would become deeply embedded in Philippine history and geography.

Five years after I began studying French, I started studying Spanish. By then, my own name had begun to feel like a small intersection of several cultural encounters: a Filipino surname with Spanish and Basque historical associations, a language connected to more than three centuries of colonial rule in the Philippines, and a typographic habit I had picked up while learning French.

Unlike Ned, I did not choose Legaspi. I inherited it.

I am careful not to treat a surname as proof of ancestry. Names travel in complicated ways, especially in countries shaped by colonization, and I do not know simply from carrying this surname exactly how it entered my own family history. But I also cannot pretend the historical resonance is not there. For a Filipino, Legaspi sits inside a much larger story of Spain and the Philippines, whether or not one’s own genealogy follows a straight line back to that history.

Ned is the name I chose. LEGASPI is the name I inherited. Putting them beside each other reminds me that identity is made from both agency and inheritance, from what we decide for ourselves and what history places in our hands.

That tension is not uniquely Filipino. Across a globalized world, many people live with names shaped by histories they did not choose. A reader in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, or elsewhere in Latin America may recognize a related inheritance from centuries of Spanish rule, just as people in other post-colonial societies carry surnames, languages, and institutions marked by earlier empires. The histories are not identical, and neither are the ways those names entered individual families. But the question can feel familiar: what do we do with an identity that is genuinely ours and yet also carries the imprint of a history larger than ourselves?

For me, that question becomes especially visible when I put the two parts of my public name together. Ned points toward self-determination. I found it in a book, liked what it seemed to promise, and chose it for the person I hoped to become. LEGASPI points in the other direction, toward inheritance, family, geography, and a colonial past I had no role in creating. One looks forward. The other looks backward. Yet both belong to me now.

So what does it mean to write that inherited name in capital letters?

I don’t think of it as a grand act of reclaiming history, and I would be uncomfortable pretending that typography could undo colonial violence. For me, the gesture is quieter than that. Writing LEGASPI boldly makes me look at the name rather than treat it as neutral. It asks me to acknowledge the history without allowing that history to dictate the whole meaning of who I am.

Maybe this is one of the negotiations of living in a globalized world. We inherit names, languages, faiths, institutions, borders, and memories from histories that were already in motion long before we arrived. We do not get to choose all of them. But we do get to decide how consciously we carry them, what meanings we preserve, what meanings we question, and what new meanings we add through the lives we build.

What began for me as a French typographic convention has therefore become something more personal. I can choose the name through which I meet the world, while still acknowledging the histories that came to me unchosen. I do not have to erase one in order to honor the other.