Curse you, Facebook!
For my whole life, I have believed that I was unique in the world. To begin with, Danielle was a very unusual name in London, Ontario where I grew up. There were no other Danielles in my classes as I moved through school, and I didn’t meet another Dani until I moved here. Back in London, there were three listings for “Donders” in the phone book: my dad, his dad, and his uncle. Now that we’ve moved to Ottawa, Dad and I have cornered the Donders market in the phone book.
Oh, I know there are other Donderses out there in the world. In fact, I have a whole book written in inscrutable Dutch, following the various Donders lineages. But never, ever have I imagined there could be another Danielle Donders.
Until now.
I found the other Danielle Donders on Facebook when Beloved set up his account last month, and not too long after found this profile from a social media hub called Hyves. We don’t seem to have too much in common, based on this limited profile information. She lives in the Netherlands, and likes Armani, Bacardi, Diesel, G-star, Hyves, Jean Paul Gaultier, Opel, Replay, Samsung, T-Mobile, Vero Moda, and Zwitsal. I’ve once visited the Netherlands and heard of a few of those things — but not most of them.
It’s weighing heavily on me, this sudden challenge to my uniqueness of nomenclature. I suppose it’s still a relatively unique name — my cousin Mike Smith would certainly argue that it is! But for 40 years I’ve been comfortable in the knowledge that I was the *only* Danielle Donders in the world and find myself surprisingly unsettled to be disabused of the notion.
I wonder if she googles her own name and is annoyed by the first three or four pages dominated by references to an obscure Canadian blogger with an addiction to the Web? (And, yes, it was this post that I was writing a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled upon the infamous “creepy thesis.”)
Are you uniquely named? How would or do you feel about sharing your name with a stranger?
