I’ve always felt a pull toward names like River, Sage, Wild. They feel soft and elemental. Something you can step into barefoot. There’s a certain ease to them. A feeling of belonging to the earth. A small ache simultaneously appears when I hear them—a little wish that my name carried that same feeling.
I was feeling this earlier in the week when someone was looking for me and yelled:
“Rocky!”
It rang for a bit in my head and then echoed deep in my chest.
I was born Raquel, after Raquel Welsh, my dad’s favorite actress–someone he once met while carrying her luggage to her room at La Costa Resort. He was smitten with her beauty, enamored with her grace. He said she smiled at him, spoke with him, and that she was lovely, inside and out. That brief moment became permanent.
It’s a name I love. It holds warmth, depth, beauty. It melts in your mouth with a sort of sensuality and playfulness that hold hands comfortably.
My mom and dad had agreed to another name before I was born, but in the hospital my dad secretly filled in my certificate with Raquel… inventing my middle name, Danielle, on the spot because the rhyme sounded good together.
Rocky came later on the playground of second grade with a boy who wouldn’t stop pulling my hair, poking me, insulting me, and following me. He filled the entire stretch of recess with his presence, over and over again. I couldn’t shake him. I begged him daily to stop, but there was no reprieve.
I remember the feeling in my body more than anything—feet planted, heart beating hard, hands curling into fists, vision going blurry. Heat rising up through me.
A final warning leaving my mouth: “If you do that again, I will punch you in the face.”
He laughed, and pulled my hair again.
In that sharp, clear moment… I made contact. My fist hitting his face with a solid crack. He fell back onto the grass in a violent scream, blood pooling from his face behind his hands. I instantly moved from defensiveness into mortification upon realizing I had done it. I had socked him straight in the nose.
I dropped to my knees, apologizing profusely. Trying to undo all of it and explaining through panic that I had warned him I meant it, that I didn’t know what else to do.
Rocky.
It was the joking nickname the adults bestowed on me after because I would have made Rocky Balboa proud and the name that kids would taunt me with because I was labeled an angry monster.
Trevor Hughes nose had been officially broken.
We were officially never allowed to interact again.
The name followed me around after that. I learned to carry the mixture of shame and power to the best of my eight-year old ability, attempting to soften the story to avoid awkward stares. I let it morph into something simpler, easier to carry.
Rocky is just short for Raquel.
You know how it goes. Take the first syllable or two, add a “y”, call it a nickname. It feels cute, easy, harmless. I was well-practiced at telling it that way. All I heard as feedback anymore was, “I had a dog named Rocky.” You and everybody else, buddy.
And then I worked diligently to shift back to my roots. My full name felt more aligned with who I was trying to become. More professional, more composed. It held a certain elegance that helped me step into interviews differently. It created distance from that moment on the playground. It shed the shame of violence and erased the immaturity of rage. I didn’t want to stand in a name that evoked the past. I wanted to lead myself into the future with a more serious identity. Rocky felt like something I needed to outgrow. Raquel felt like success.
Years later, I found myself desperately trying to claw my way out of the rat race. I had let every boundary crumble and I needed to get out of the noise. The life I had built in the big city suddenly felt like pressure and despair, so on a whim, I ran away to the Rocky Mountains. I didn’t choose it because I knew what was next. I’m pretty sure now that the Rockies chose me and I just followed their guidance completely unaware.
I moved only with the notion that I needed nature. I needed to connect with it after being lost and lonely for decades. I needed a place where I could breath. Where I could hear my heart beat. I was back to being a scared little girl trying to use her voice to express and create boundaries all over again and I couldn’t do it, so I fled. Run now, think later.
At some point in my rebuilding a few states away, I started introducing myself as Rocky. The name resurfaced naturally and Utah didn’t even know Raquel existed.
I didn’t see it then, but sitting with it now I realize I was creating sovereignty in that declaration. I was reclaiming my place among the earth, adopting the pines and the moose as my kin. I was returning to my roots and attempting to rebuild a new path for myself, away from external pressure and compassed by inner truth.
So I subconsciously returned to a name that gave me permission to be part of Mother Earth. It’s not as inherently granola as River or Sage or Wild, but I was missing the point of my longing. I didn’t want to be someone else, I just wanted to be part of the whole.
And Rocky is perfect.
Rock is what everything else builds from. Before there are trees, there is ground. Before there is movement, there is the foundation that holds it. Before anything grows, there is the unmovable base that stays.
Rocky is the part that doesn’t drift.
It’s the hillside that takes the full force of the storm. The mountain that doesn’t move when the seasons change. The mountains don’t ask to be anything other than what they are. They rise, they erode, they hold, they break, the rebuild. They exist in cycles that are too slow to rush and too vast to control. It’s jagged edges and loose gravel. It’s scraped knees and dust on you hands. It’s the sound of boots against stone and the feeling of your body adjusting to uneven terrain. It’s what teaches us how to balance, how to trust our footing, how to keep going even when the path isn’t smooth. It’s steady. It doesn’t need to be smaller or softer or easier to hold. It is majestic and powerful.
To the mountains that held me when I didn’t know how to hold myself. To the way the air thins as you climb, forcing you to slow down, to breath deeper, to pay attention to the life force inside your body. To the silence that isn’t empty, but full of wind, carrying the songs of trees and birds. To the way the light hits at dusk, softening everything for only a moment before it all disappears. To the cold mornings, the unpredictability. To the feeling of being small compared to the vast wide open.
You have never asked me to change. You have never asked me to explain myself. You simply let me arrive, over and over again. You have taught me how to be with myself in the same way. How to hold without fixing, how to stand without proving, how to exist without performing. You’ve shown me that strength doesn’t need to announce itself–presence is enough. There is power in staying, in taking up space exactly as you are, through every season, through every cycle, through every shift, through every version of yourself that comes and goes.
Rocky reminds me of what it feels like to trust what’s underneath me. To belong to something that doesn’t require me to become anything other than what I already am.
