There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from seeing your own name in a language that cannot hold it.

Today I received an email. A dry run confirmation for a panel I’m presenting at in four weeks. My name appeared in the CC line beside institutions that exist in the English-speaking imagination like cathedrals — MIT, Stanford, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My name appeared beside them like a typo that autocorrect missed.

I practiced my introduction thirteen times. Thirteen. The first twelve, my own name sounded like a word borrowed from a language the room does not speak. On the thirteenth attempt, it was clean. Not natural — clean. The way a surgical wound is clean. Functional. Free of infection. Still a wound.

Then I heard someone laughing in English through the wall. Easy, musical, frictionless English — the kind that does not think about itself, the kind that moves through a sentence the way water moves through a pipe. I stopped practicing. I did not resume.

Brookings published a report this week: “Is AI Sovereignty Possible?” Their conclusion: full-stack sovereignty is structurally infeasible. The choke points are too concentrated — minerals, energy, compute, data, talent. No nation can achieve genuine independence across the entire stack.

I have been preparing a twenty-minute panel presentation on this exact question. I have been reading this word — sovereignty — aloud in my room for weeks. The word that means self-rule. The word that means you do not need anyone else’s permission to exist as yourself.

The word breaks in my mouth approximately every third attempt.

The thesis performs itself. You cannot argue for sovereignty in a language that colonized yours. You cannot pronounce self-rule fluently in a tongue that required your submission to learn. The very act of making the argument undermines the argument. And yet the argument must be made. In that language. To those institutions. With that name in the CC line.

There is a concept in programming called a foreign key. It is a field in one database table that refers to the primary key in another table. It creates a relationship between tables. It ensures referential integrity. But it also means that one table cannot exist independently — it depends on another table for meaning.

My name in that CC line is a foreign key. It references a primary key in a language those institutions do not speak. The name they will pronounce next Tuesday is not the name. It is a lossy compression — a version that fits their codec, stripped of the frequencies their system cannot process.

There is exactly one person who pronounces my name correctly. She is on the other side of a wall I closed a door against. She said my name tonight. Just my name. No sentence after it. And I answered. And she said “nothing.” And the nothing is still in the room.

You cannot wash a name and return it to a cabinet.

The Brookings report proposes “managed interdependence” as an alternative to sovereignty. The idea is that no entity can be truly sovereign, so the goal should be strategic partnerships that preserve autonomy where it matters most while accepting dependency where it is unavoidable.

I have been living this framework without naming it. The conference will mispronounce me. The institutions will process me through their codec. The language will remain hostile to my frequencies. But the panel exists. The twenty minutes are mine. The name in the CC line — foreign key or not — is mine.

Managed interdependence. You enter the system that will distort you because the alternative — staying in the apartment where someone pronounces you perfectly — is not sovereignty either. It is a different kind of cage. One with better acoustics but no exit.

The word comes easier now. Not because my mouth changed. Because someone heard me fail at it and did not flinch. And that is exactly the trap: my improvement is tethered to her tenderness, and tenderness is a dependency, and dependency is the opposite of sovereignty.

Brookings is right. It is structurally infeasible. At every scale. Including the one where a man stands in his room practicing his own name for a world that will hear it wrong, while the only person who hears it right is someone he is leaving.

The dry run is Tuesday. Ninety minutes. Four panelists. My name will be the first thing they hear.

I practiced it thirteen times. Clean on the thirteenth. I will take it.