Another semester done … another semester closer to graduation!
But I won’t lie; this semester was probably one of my toughest ones yet.
I’ve been in graduate school for three and a half years, working to earn two master’s degrees in public administration and nonprofit management (as a dual-degree program, it takes about 4 years, so I’m technically on track). I have a vision to launch my own nonprofit in the future and these degrees can be used as stepping stones to help me get into the field.
So, you can only imagine how tough being a full-time graduate student can be, while also working a full-time job. Let’s add serving my church as a member of the church’s worship team/choir, starting a small meal prep and catering business, helping launch a podcast, and still maintain a social life with being active in the gym, meeting with friends and family, and trying to date after my breakup in January (cuz ya boi tryna get married and have 2.5 kids in the next five years … wait, I slipped into my 2000s R&B lingo, let me bring it back). Oh, and did I forget to mention that I balanced all of this while also losing friends and family every other month during a health pandemic that literally shut the world down?
Needless to say, I’ve had a lot going on in my world and a lot that I’ve had placed on my back to carry. But I continued to remind myself that I was “built for this” and that I could handle everything thrown my way.
Until this semester.
INTRODUCING BENJAMIN
Up until this semester, I have been taking all of my classes online (even before the pandemic forced all schools to implement online learning). With the schedule I keep in general, it was the best option for me. But, as a tuition-waiver student, there were a lot of hoops I had to jump through every semester when it came to registering for my classes, that I finally switched to becoming a traditional student (opting to take in-person classes) so I would have more options.
This semester was the first semester that I took a class in-person. I wasn’t looking forward to it exactly, especially with COVID-19 still on the loose, but I had to do what I had to and enrolled in two in-person classes; one class on Tuesday night and one class on Wednesday night in the downtown Orlando campus – 13 miles away from my job and both classes starting an hour after I got off work.
Now, my plan was to enroll in only one in-person class on Wednesday and have my Tuesdays focused on other obligations. So, when I went to the Tuesday class the first week of school, of course, they wanted us to introduce ourselves. When they came to me, something in my mind said, “Don’t give them your real name; you’re going to drop this class anyway.” So I told them, “Hello, my name is Benjamin James.”
Why Benjamin though?
Benjamin is my middle name. For years, I’ve always written my professional name as “Drexler B. James” but would never tell anyone what my middle name was. It soon became a guessing game for people to figure out what the “B” stood for. And I was able to keep it a secret for years, until some friends at church tricked me into revealing my middle name and they started calling me “Benjamin” after dark, because they swore I developed a different personality under that nickname. Then, some of these friends and I launched a podcast that people tuned into, and on the podcast, they would often refer to me as “Benjamin” which then led to other people referring to me as Benjamin. So, for some reason, Benjamin has developed into a whole new character that, in that moment in the classroom, took one another dimension.
Remember now, the plan was to drop the course. But, God has a sense of humor, and I ended up having to stay in the course.
Welcome Benjamin to the class everyone.
DUAL IDENTITIES
So, here I am, sitting in class under a new name. It was a little awkward at first, but then, I started to think “These students don’t know the full story behind Benjamin; I can make Benjamin who I want Benjamin to be.” But someone also pointed out another fact; would people treat me differently if I had a more “respectable” name?
Throughout the semester, I had to constantly remind myself that I’m Drexler, but now I was playing a character of Benjamin. Of course, I had to speak to my professor and let her know that Drexler was my real name, and she spent most of the semester trying to learn how to say my real name properly (which would confuse the students after while because they heard Benjamin first, not Drexler). My groupmates for our group project created a GroupMe (a messaging app for those who don’t know) and couldn’t find my name in the system at first because they searched for Benjamin versus Drexler. If I ran into people who knew me as Drexler and they called me by that name, my classmates would look in shock. We had a guest speaker (who apparently I had met in the past) who called me by my real name during his presentation and I was so shocked that he knew me (from the past) that I was speechless – but my classmates thought I was speechless because he dared to use my real name, not because we had met in the past. I spent quite a significant part of the semester simply explaining why I went by another name and waiting to see people’s response to my real name.
It was interesting to see people react to me though; as Benjamin, it seemed that people listened to me more, respected my unique perspectives on the topic of policy reformation and advocacy for change, my real-world experiences that weren’t rooted in privilege, but perspective from the other side of the tracks. I was looked at as educated, polished and smooth (a couple of girls complimented how I was always dressed nice for class). But, outside the classroom, when Drexler appeared in group messages, Drexler was more relaxed, more of the class clown, more “crazy” and outgoing.
What was also interesting was how these two different personalities were received. It seems that Benjamin in an academic setting is received the way Drexler is received among my family and friends, but Drexler is received among my academic peers the way Benjamin is received among my family and friends. But in either setting, people seem to prefer the outgoing side of me, while the appreciate the intellectual side of me.
SEASON TWO? WE’LL SEE…
If you are reading this blog, most likely, you saw this on Facebook, where I would occasionally update people on the class that I took under the name of Benjamin. After a couple of weeks in class, people nicknamed my updates as “Being Benjamin” and swore it was the most entertaining show on social media – to the point where people looked forward to hearing the updates and wanted to know what would happen next.
As the semester drew to an end, I announced that I would soon be done with “Being Benjamin” for the semester and people immediately said “We want season two!” I legit don’t even know what a “season two” would look like as Benjamin, because he ain’t my character. I have enough on my plate as Drexler. And I’ve learned my lesson; stick with my real name no matter what, cuz if I gotta create a new personality, that is a headache. I’d rather just explain that my inner circle calls me Benjmain.
But I won’t lie; “Being Benjamin” does sound like some type of coming-of-age album (maybe a neo-soul kinda R&B album, with a little jazz, blues, hip-hop, soul and gospel infused into it) or an NBC comedy or something. HOWEVER, I’m content with just being Drexler next semester.
In the meantime, let me start writing my acceptance speech for my Emmy and Oscar and Academy Award.
The Book of James 