Katie Van Heidrich: Hi, my name is Katie Van Heidrich. I was born Katherine Elise Van Heidrich. Growing up, I was not really a huge fan of my name. Katherine felt so formal and sophisticated in a way that I didn't necessarily connect with or to. My mother always tells me that I was named after my great grandma, Catherine, which initially made her really excited to have a newborn baby named after her.

However, she was very disappointed to find out that my mother chose to spell my name with a K instead of a C. So that's something that I always remembered growing up. I went by Katie. And early in life, I didn't really like my name. I didn't really feel like it fit. So as you'll see, and in between whenever we were moving around, which was a lot, we made a lot of mid-year moves, cross-country moves for a variety of reasons. But whenever we would get to somewhere new, I would change my name to something else, some other variation of Katie that I could adopt and try to make more mine, and how I felt Katie was.

And so when I moved to Florida for a little bit, I changed my name to Kitty. And I remember when I moved to San Francisco, oddly enough, actually I live in San Francisco now, but I also live here for a little bit when I was a kid before coming back to Atlanta. But when I lived here, I changed my name to Kathy. And each time I did my best to really feel like this name was mine, but it never really stuck. And I always came back to Katie. And it wasn't really until high school that I really began to accept my name and love my name. And now, I feel like my name perfectly embodies who I am. I wouldn't change it for the world. But it's just really interesting to me how much I did growing up trying to figure out who I was, what name I connected with, and who I wanted to be known as.