When my mom was in the delivery room giving birth to me, she didn’t have a name picked out for me yet. It wasn’t because I was early or she wasn’t expecting me, she just couldn’t think of a name for me. When she and the doctor were talking, the doctor said “She was destined to be alive”. When I was a newborn, I used to have trouble breathing, and I would stop breathing randomly. As I got older my breathing was completely normal. So, my mom wanted to name me Destin-`e but the government said since we're not Italian we couldn’t do it. So, instead, she named me Destine but it's pronounced Des-tin-y, like luck or fate.

      Growing up I always used to hate my name because people always used to mispronounce it. They used to call me Des-Tine, Like as in rhymes with the number nine, Destin(e), when you say it doesn't pronounce any letter after the letter n, and Deniseb. I grew up in Chicago and a couple of people had the same name but it was spelled differently so the teachers would know how to pronounce it. Most of the people who had a similar name were African American. Since I'm mixed(Mexican and black), the teachers would kinda put two and two together. The way the other girls would have their name spelled was Destiny.

But when I moved to the suburbs, a lot of the teachers didn’t know how to pronounce it. Most of the teachers that didn’t know how to pronounce it were usually white because they were used to more white-sounding names. When I first moved to the suburbs in the beginning of 7th grade I didn’t like it at all because it was nothing like the city. One of the main things that were different was there was no diversity because mostly everyone was white. Another big difference was the atmosphere because in the city there are a lot of buildings and people walking around everywhere, and also in the city, you would have to be careful about what street you were on. But, in the suburbs, you don’t have to worry about any of that.