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Imagine that you’re a five-year-old child. Imagine that you are a child and you are fed and clothed and loved and named. Of course you take this for granted. The things that always have been always will be and so they are unimportant.
Now imagine that you are a child, and you are taken underground and ripped away from all you know. They take you deep into the dark separated from everyone you ever loved, they take away your identity, only you don’t realize because you don't understand what an identity is yet. They make you use a number instead of your name, and you don’t know that that matters, because a name is something you’ve always had, and you think it’s just a sound, you don’t see how it’s different from a number. And so they take everything, and it hurts so, so much. You miss your home and your family and your life, but it’s hard to remember. Your name is just a sound so it’s easy to forget. But then you are just a number, and no one has ever tucked a number into bed, or told it they loved it, or asked after its dreams. Numbers are only tools and they’re not supposed to feel, and feeling hurts so much. Being a tool is all you have, being a good tool is all you have left, and if forgetting what you had makes you better, you don’t realize what you’d lose because you’ve always had it, and you don’t want to hurt. In the end it’s easy to forget.
Imagine you are a cruel, twisted, grasping old man, and you want strength because you want power. You don’t understand how important it is to love and to feel because you never have, so you only see how impossible it is to control and you hate it, because what you care most about is control. You take children because you think that they are weak and you think that they are malleable and you are half right. You are in the business of breaking people, even if you think you are building them stronger, and since breaking things is always easy you succeed. You create your own little army of emotionless doll people and you feel so very smug, you turn children into weapons that you know will never turn on you and you feel secure. You succeed but you do not understand why, because you do not understand. You strip children of their very selves, but you do not understand how you’ve done it. Because you don’t understand what a self is, of course you don’t, you’d never destroy them if you did. You could never understand what selfhood means, because you’ve never bothered to understand anyone else’s and your own is such a small, ugly, petty thing that it’s almost not worth mentioning, so of course you think that personhood is easy to lose.
Now imagine you are this selfish, writhled old warhawk and you see a child who is alone and unloved and so very palpitatingly powerful. Of course you think he’s perfect.
Imagine you are five years old and you are Uzumaki Naruto. You are Uzumaki Naruto . Your name is Uzumaki Naruto and for years and years you didn’t know you had a name at all, you were only called monster or demon or that damn brat, and you never had anyone who cared, and you weren’t sure that you were human at all. But now you are five years old and you have a name and so you scream it from the rooftops. You will never, ever take this for granted. Imagine that you are Naruto and you were ignored until you learned to stop crying, and you were yelled at until you learned to yell back. You are Naruto and no one has ever loved you, and you have wanted to love the Sandaime, but you only get to see him sometimes and you never really got the chance.
Imagine you are Uzumaki Naruto and you are taken under ground away from all you know. And there in the dark no one hates you and no one shouts at you, at least not only you, and you are almost never hungry.
They try to take away your identity and you know exactly what they’re doing.
Not in so many words, of course. No one has ever told you what an identity is or how important it is to have a name. But your name is something that had to be told to you, something you discovered. People have seen you as a thing, treated you like a thing, all your life, and you have fought and scraped and screamed for every scrap of humanity you can get.
They hurt you when you loudly, stubbornly, hold on to your name. Worse, they hurt people who aren’t you. You aren’t used to unfairness directed at people who aren’t you, and it scares you.
This is the first time you’ve ever been treated just like everyone else, and you love it. This is the first time everyone else has been treated just like you, and that makes you furious.
You want to please these people, because you’ve always wanted to please everybody even when you never could, and you don’t want anyone to get hurt. So you go quiet again, like you did when you were very, very small, before you learned that people would still hate you even if you never ever asked anything of them. You go small and obedient and try to be the best little ninja ever, because you think ninja are really, really cool, and you’ve always wanted to be the best, and the old man knows enough to smile at you and maybe even pat you on the head when you please him. But at night when nobody is listening, you whisper your name to yourself over and over and over again because you refuse to forget.
Imagine you are Uzumaki Naruto and your smile is sunshine and your heart can fit the whole world and you have never once taken anything for granted. Imagine you grow up in the bowels of darkness surrounded by children who are not taught to hate you, because hate is just as inefficient as anything else. Imagine that all you have in the world is your own self and a secret name. Well. That is more than anyone else has there. That is more than enough.
You make friends, because friendship is your magic. You are careful in this world, because you have to be, you have learned to be silent and watchful and wary, and deadly as a knife in the dark. But you make friends, because no one hates you here, and that is all you have ever wanted. You give precious gifts. Trust is the first one, and you are careful that it is deserved. The second one is this:
“Hi, I’m Uzumaki Naruto! What’s your name? Of course you have a name! Everybody has a name. If you don’t remember yours we can make one up.”
If you are a bitter, empty old man, then you have gravely miscalculated.