On a sleepy Friday afternoon last January, I received a package at work. I was relatively new on the job, so I wondered, who even knew my work address?

It was getting dark, and I opened the box distracted, trading weekend plans with my coworkers. But I stopped talking when I saw what was inside: two pairs of khaki pants from JCPenney, my size. Now I was really confused. I hadn’t ordered any pants.

The following Monday, Elliot Williams — a student at American University who shared my name and, apparently, physique — was there to collect the pants. Turns out, his mother in St. Louis had accidentally addressed them to “Elliot Williams” with the address for American University, and as a DCist reporter, I’m technically an AU employee (the university holds the license for our parent company WAMU). Classic mixup.

The funny thing is, this Elliot Williams wouldn’t be the first or the last person in the District I’d meet with my same exact name, spelling, and career path (he’s interested in journalism, his parents’ profession).

This fascination with my name doppelgängers began long before I met the AU student. In fact, it’s been an obsession of mine, ever since I discovered in high school that there was a basketball player named Elliot Williams who had a brief career in the NBA. (He didn’t immediately respond to my interview request, though it says he’s seen my Facebook message.)

Name mixups aren’t a problem unique to me, of course. Remember the two Michael Browns in D.C. politics? Nationally, the name Michael Brown has been synonymous with the struggle for racial justice. But locally, Michael D. Brown is one of our city’s “shadow senators,” and the other is former D.C. Councilmember Michael A. Brown, who went to prison for accepting bribes. What about all the Andrew Yangs who got Venmo requests for $1,000 last year? And can you imagine being the college basketball player at Providence named David Duke? Try carving your legacy with the same name as a Klan leader or racist congressman Steve King, or being sportscaster Gerry Sandusky (no, not Jerry Sandusky). And what about the poor Disney publicist named Jeffrey Epstein?

I guess things could be worse.

A few months before I received the mysterious khakis, when I was still working at Washingtonian, a coworker nudged my shoulder. She pointed to the TV above one of the cubicles, which was always tuned to CNN, and there on the screen, a light-skinned African American legal analyst appeared as my name scrolled across the chyron.

Was this the same guy my parents had told me they’d seen on the nightly news? The big-time attorney my boss had pointed out to me when he appeared in Politico Playbook? It was.

I soon discovered that our Twitter handles were similar. We even shared a middle initial, “C.” I tweeted at him a few times and discovered that he was good at memes. When I asked if this town was big enough for the two of us, he replied: “The question here is whether the plural is ‘Elliots Williams,’ not unlike ‘attorneys general,’ “courts martial,’ or ‘Whoppers Junior.’”

“Damn, he’s good,” I thought.

If you squinted, you might even mistake us for brothers, or the same Elliot C. Williams — the main difference being that I have a bit more hair. It’s no wonder, then, that I started receiving emails meant for his inbox and tweets meant for his handle.

At first, they were warm. “Thank you for being brave,” wrote one woman who lived “in the red part of a blue state,” in response to CNN Elliot’s poignant op-ed on President Trump’s pick of Rush Limbaugh for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But, as CNN Elliot got more vocal in his opposition to Trump, his responders, mistakenly emailing me, got more aggressive.

Exhibit A: One man particularly upset with CNN Elliot’s op-ed about Trump’s attacks on the media wrote, “Would love to chat about your take on Trump, your oblivious belief that people take CNN seriously, your moronic take on the lack of onslaught of the media on Trump, and your lack of acceptance that Trump is still (your) President. Looking forward to hearing from you!”

Hear from me, he did. “Funny enough, you’ve got the wrong Elliot,” I wrote back. He didn’t believe me. After a brief back-and-forth, I got a cold final response: “I’m not sure what’s worse. Someone who works for CNN or someone who is a ‘writer.’ No wonder I got you guys confused.”

But things had already gotten weird, before the emails. At some point last winter, I was at a comedy club working on a radio piece. The walls were covered in empty beer bottles, and the subterranean tavern was damp and dark. As I fidgeted with my recording equipment, a tall man with a sharply trimmed fade and beard stopped me. He explained that he was a media producer and comedian and invited me to a show he was hosting later that week at another club. I knew I couldn’t make it, but we exchanged information anyway.

“Elliot Williams … that’s the name of my best friend,” he said.

“Oh, no way! It’s funny,” I told him, “I’m thinking about writing an essay about meeting other Elliots. Does your friend live in D.C.?”

“His body does …” When I didn’t understand, he added, “He’s buried here. He was hit by a bus.”

When he took my business card, he stared at it like he’d seen a ghost. Perhaps, in some way, he had.

Soon, after a few of these encounters, my quest for other Elliots, and other Elliots Williams (the plural form, per CNN Elliot), became a quest for meaning. I was told in grad school to focus on “my brand,” to make a website that was unique to me where all my work could be found. When I moved to D.C. in December 2017, I thought this would be the perfect place to carve out my own space in the massive media industry. I mean, how many young, Black magazine interns named Elliot could there be? I even penned an essay about how much of a unicorn I thought I was. But what happens when you look up your name and get all these other options?

First, there’s sophomore Elliot ‘Khaki Pants’ Williams. I recently learned of a hardware hacker named Elliot Williams who helped create a “hackerspace” in D.C., but since moved to Germany, according to this profile. There’s even an Elliot Williams at the Canberra Times in Australia. I know this because our bylines kept showing up on the same MuckRack page until I emailed customer support. There’s Elliot Carter, another D.C.-based writer whom I met twice before he added me to a Twitter list of notable Elliots. There’s the D.C. radio host, Elliot in the Morning (there goes my idea for a local radio show).

Am I (we? them?) everywhere? Should I be taking advantage of this opportunity to connect with people I share something so obviously in common with? Should I ask one of these Elliots to be my name-sharing mentor? Should I start a Zoom conference call with the other Elliots, or gather in person, as did the 433 Nigels who met at a British pub to “celebrate Nigelness?” Would I hate all the other Elliots? Worse yet, what if I loved them?

To get some answers, I set up a Zoom chat with CNN Elliot, figuring I could at least get to know the guy I keep getting mistaken for.

On our call, just before the November election, we talked about our various survival methods during the pandemic and how his kids have helped him get out of the house and stay relatively sane. We chatted about the disconnect between capital-w “Washington” and the District, and compared our favorite takeout places across the city.

In general, he was as smart and impressive as one would expect of a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Obama administration appointee. But I hadn’t scheduled the call to talk politics. I wanted to know if he’d ever had encounters with other Elliots Williams, besides me. Very rarely, he said:

“There’s an Elliot Williams that’s clearly based in London whose email I occasionally get spammed with. There’s an Elliot I went to college with, but it’s not that common of a first name.”

I asked him if I made a Facebook group for the other Elliots, would he join, or would he consider us his mortal enemies?

“I hope to ruin every one of you and be the last Elliot Williams standing,” he said, grinning. “And you can quote me on that.”

Shortly after that call, I reconnected with the AU student Elliot Williams. Now a junior political science major taking online classes from an apartment in St. Louis, he’s wondering, like many students, if he’ll ever return to campus. While at home, he’s had a lot of time to think about his future, really examine what he’s interested in. I couldn’t help but think of myself at 20 years old, running with the wind, feeling like I had control over everything and nothing at all. I couldn’t imagine trying to figure it all out virtually during a pandemic, but I tried to offer my best advice. It was the least I could do for another Elliot.

We discussed our shared affinity for khakis, our unfortunate initials, and the effects of the rampant gentrification in D.C. He added that his dad, Charles, named him Elliot because it’s hard to shorten or assign a nickname — although, we both admitted we’d been called “Smelliot” by our classmates as kids. He then offered something profound.

“The interesting thing about a name is that it very much distinguishes you from other people, and yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything just on its own,” he said. “It’s about how you assign meaning to that name.”

Records indicate that close to 30,000 boys in the United States have been named Elliot since 1880, according to this random website, and its popularity has only increased with the help of Elliot from Pete’s Dragon, Elliot from Scrubs (the name is unisex), and Elliott from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; hence, why many people spell my name with two Ts in emails. Per Whitepages.com there could be anywhere from seven to 13 Elliots Williams (with a few variations on the spelling) in the immediate D.C. area.

Still, I can’t shake the creepy feeling I get when I see my name on other people, which happens more frequently now that I’ve started keeping track of these experiences. Like others, I have wondered, should I think of them as name-emies, or should I plan a trip to Bali with them?

In the wake of these discoveries, I’ve been forced to come to terms with the fact that I am not as unique as I thought I was, not even in the District of Columbia, and that the “brand” I’ve spent years building is not mine and mine alone. Perhaps, there’s some comfort in knowing that — there’s a weight, or an ego, I can let go of.

Just days before the U.S. reported its first coronavirus cases, I went on a weekend retreat in rural Maryland with my church. As much as I went to read the Bible, pray and all that, I also revelled in the opportunity to get away from the city for a bit, maybe even get away from the other Elliots.

I brought along a Sunday edition of the Washington Post to read. I turned to the Metro section, and the page of death notices popped out. There it was: a man with my name, 83, of Washington, D.C., deceased. Now I was the one seeing a ghost. But I looked closer.

Elliott Singleton Williams. I prayed for him and his family, of course. But I also added one: “Thank God,” I whispered. “He had two Ts.”