I never really liked my name. “Joanna” always just felt dated, and I hated how choppy the syllables were. I hated its affiliation to a certain fabric and craft store, making me feel about twenty years older. For the longest time, I was jealous of my sister’s prettier, flowier name “Sarah”, and I even lied to my kindergarten class, telling them that my real name was actually “Lily”. Even though it was not my choice the six letters of my name and its three syllables hold the essence of who I am and convey the person I have become. However, it was the shorter versions of my name that truly carry the story of my life, marked by the people who have taught me the lessons that make me the person I am today. 

For as long as I could remember, I’ve been called nicknames by my family. “Jojo” was the very first one, and in every home family video, there is a smiling, crawling Jojo. Not Joanna; strictly Jojo. I was around five when I realized that the nickname meant that I was Jojo Cho, and a change was needed. So, to this day, the only people that call me that name are my family, but when they do it, I don’t mind. It brings back memories of running through my grandparents’ old dry cleaning store, them calling for me in 

their heavy Korean accents so I could help make hangers, making my name sound more like “Cho-do”. It reminds me of the way they would teach me to phonetically write my name in Korean, the way my dad would tuck me in at night after work, or playing hide-and-seek with my siblings. So, in a way, Jojo is the very first version of me She was the young girl who learned what love was, and the importance of family. She is the girl with short hair and awful bangs who learned what hard work and selflessness was from the examples of her family, and what it means to sacrifice and to have ambition. 

For the latter part of my life,“Jo” was the appropriate nickname. Short and easy- it’s what all of my friends and family-friends call me. Most people still use the abbreviation today, and it is what I respondto on a daily basis. It marked a new era of my life, one that was dominated by friends, school, and laughter. As much as my family has formed me into the person I am today, the friends that I have made along the way are also fundamental parts of me. The nickname first originated sometime in elementary school, when my friend Naomi decided that “Jo” suited me much better. We went to church together, so naturally, everybody at church began to call me Jo. These were the people I really grew up with and experienced life with- the slew of my church friends that I’ve known ever since I was a toddler. Together, we read books, went trick-or-treating, organized secret santas, celebrated birthdays, saw movies, went to each other’s band/

orchestra concerts, went to prom, celebrated graduations, and waved goodbye as college finally separated us. The people who call me Jo are the first people I drove when I got my license and the first I call in crises. They have seen me through my highest and lowest moments, and are the ones who taught me that friendship means sticking with your people through the thick and thin, no matter what life throws at you. 

It’s oddly categorical, how I organize the people in my life according to what they call me. Anybody who calls me Jojo is my family, Jo is for my friends, and Joanna is a formality reserved for everybody else. All in all, my name isn’t my favorite thing and it probably never will be. But, I’ve grown to appreciate the life it’s led me through so far, all the people I’ve met and all the lessons I have learned. These shorter versions of my name represent people who have taught me to love and persevere, synonymous with family dinners and late night drives. They are all people who form the person I am today, and the nickname they call me signifies the stake they have in my life. So, though my name is not what I would have chosen for myself, each era in my life is marked by a different nickname,  making me who I am today, which is something that I love and would never change. 

 

When my siblings and I were little, we tried out a bunch of sports. For my brother, baseball was what stuck and my sister ended up with soccer. As for me, I ended up choosing swimming as my sport, which seemed like a small decision at the time but has ultimately become one of my most formative.

It all began one summer, when my mom decided to sign Jonathan, Sarah, and I up for our neighborhood swim team. At the age of seven, I became an official Huntington Estates Seahawk. I don’t have that many memories from back then- it’s all a blur of water, sunshine, awful tan lines, tents, and late-night swim meets. I wasn’t great at the sport, but I wasn’t too bad. Mainly, I liked it because there was no pressure of playing on a team.

So, after many summers of swimming, I decided to join a club team. That is when things definitely took a turn. I had no friends on the new team, and I left every practice exhausted and discouraged. The saying that ‘there’s no crying in baseball’ definitely was not a universal sports adage. Every practice and every meet, the racking anxiety that I was embarrassingly slow took hold, thus teaching me what panic attacks were. But, I also learned what it meant to not be the best at everything, and the value in persistence. Even though being last was, and still is, the worst feeling in the world, it taught me to better regulate my emotions and pushed me to do things I was uncomfortable with, humbling my expectations while teaching me that my self-worth was not tied to being the best. 

I trudged on through my anxiety, feeling as though I needed to do a sport simply because both my siblings did a sport. Somehow, I made it to the summer before my freshman year of high school, when I decided that I would join the swim team, which has proven to be a conversely horrible and incredible decision. On the negative side, balancing academics, extracurriculars, and athletics on top of my family life was a struggle. Early mornings andlate nights dedicated to the pool were extremely time-consuming and tiring. There is nothing better than falling into bed after an especially difficult practice, but this is not feasible when homework and studying need to be done. Pre-meet anxiety was still ever-present, especially because the events at the high-school level are often longer and thus more difficult. The fear of being last and forever embarrassing myself is constant, especially because it still happens quite often (again, I wouldn’t consider myself great at the sport).

But above all, swimming is cold, especially when it is 5:30 in the morning. I would wake up cold, get into the freezing pool, get back into the freezing pool hours later, and sometimes walk outside in the cold. There were many mornings when I would wonder why I picked swimming, internally yell at my parent for not putting me in dance, and question if I would ever be warm again (admittedly very dramatic, but it feels very valid at the moment). 

But, through all these negatives, choosing to swim is perhaps one of the best decisions I made in high school, because I met the people who would become some of my best friends. It all started on day one of practice freshman year. I was put into lane twelve with a bunch of other freshman girls, and we all had one thing in common- we were cold and tired. We ended up spending a lot of time together, and by the end of freshman year, a little group had formed. As the years and the swim seasons went by, my little group was refined to a pack of four. Looking back on these past couple of years, I have an endless amount of memories in the pool and outside of it. There was that time we snuck goldfish to our lane and smacked the entire practice, all the meets we spent freaking out, the time we poured water 

 on our heads so our moms thought we went to practice, or our senior relay that we swam in matching fish caps. There were other times when our swim friend group ventured outside the aquatic arena, eating birthday breakfasts and fifth-period lunches, or the times we spent taking trips to places like New Buffalo and Springfield. One time, we even got within six feet of Dua Lipa. And the strangest part is, I can accredit all of that to swim, something that I don’t even like. The best way to describe it is that we hated it, but we hated it together, which is what originally bonded us. 

To me, swimming is synonymous with tears, cold, and anxiety. But, if I could go back I wouldn’t change my decision because it is also synonymous with early mornings on fifth avenue, late-night movies the Sugar Factory, and so, so much laughter. The people that I have met are the first ones I text when something exciting happens, and have become some of my favorite people in the world. So, even though I dislike the sport, it deserves a heartfelt thank you, for teaching me perseverance and giving me some of my best friends.