is a difficult matter.
But, more interesting: the naming of people. Choices people make in what they call themselves, especially, or in any way how they portray themselves. (Though I forget where, Michelle was discussing her gravatar image, and how she feels it’s no longer quite right to identify herself. I find it easier, since most of my images are cats, so I don’t feel the need to change them much: the cats do not change much, unlike kids.)
I’ve had a — shall we say — fractious relationship with my name. As a child I went by a lot of different names, which I won’t bother to list, though I will note that you can identify when I owned things based on what name I wrote in them. (Never my real name, or at least not until I was older.) My parents apparently fought with the people at Disneyworld when I wanted to have the mouse ears hat with “Jake the Snake” written on it. (This was my first alterna-name, which was in part because I was going to be Jacob, had I been a he, and my father called me that occasionally; the snake part was, of course, from Sesame Street.) The other name I used a lot was from a trolley: Polly, often Pollycat.
I wonder what my blog might have been like had I been jakethesnake, or pollycat, instead of wolfangel.
For some reason in elementary school I always went by my first name, though I continued not to like it. I preferred my middle name, and disliked my Hebrew name and last name. (For a very long time I thought I would change to my mother or grandmother’s birth names when I grew up. I sometimes wish I’d done the latter, a bit.) My last name was particularly bad when my father, thinking it was a good idea, told some people in my (first) high school a (bad) nickname he’d had based on his last name.
I kept *intending* to go by my middle name, but didn’t change when I switched high schools, or went to summer camp, only (eventually) when I went to Cegep. It stuck just fine in Cegep and while I was in chemistry, but people said I seemed more like a firstname than a middlename. And my family and friends I had from high school didn’t change names. I felt weirdly divided and not myself, or with two many identities. People called me different things, and I was unhappy, and this feeling of being a fake with even a fake name (multiple fake names!) was not helping. I switched to linguistics and tried to get people to call me by both names. That seriously didn’t take. So I’m sort of back to my first name, except sometimes I go by first and middle, and a few people still call my by my middle name.
And online I’ve gone through multiple handles, more than I can even recall.
I’ve fought with my name a lot, fought with accepting it as some sort of designator, some way of defining my identity. It’s not a particularly interesting or unusual name; it’s hard to pronounce if English isn’t your first language; and, what’s always made me bitter, there is no good nickname for it. I felt like I was being penned into something I didn’t choose and couldn’t even change to make more like me, somehow. And this was, in ways, my life being played out on one small subfield: as is life, things happen that I didn’t want and I couldn’t change the facts of them. (Some were, oddly, associated with my name.)
And I’ve gotten comfortable with my name, finally; I still sometimes wish it were a different name, but — weirdly anthropomorphic as this sounds — it’s gone through a lot with me, and it’s come to fit, more or less, and I am comfortable with the ways it does not. Perhaps people who associated me as wolfangel too long find, if they learn it, that my real name sounds somehow wrong: I have certainly found the same about bloggers, where if I learned their name after associating them with a pseudonym too long, the name seemed odd. (Actually, I’m sort of curious if anyone else feels this way.) But then I also have trouble changing from a full name to a nickname for people. Did I first meet you as Valerie? I might never switch to Val.
But, digression aside, I feel like I’ve worn down the rough edges of my name, and also a bit that it’s worn down the parts of me that don’t fit. I fought so much with and about it that it’s an important part of me. Which is partially, I think, why I’m a hardass about name changes on marriage and about choices for names of your children. My parents have three daughters, and of my cousins who share my last name, only one is a boy — and, frankly, I don’t like just his values being associated with my name. (I suspect his sisters would not keep their names.) I might or might not ever have children, so this might be a moot point. But still it bothers me, perhaps unfairly, choices that other people make. (There are good reason for changing your name. And even if the reason isn’t good, it’s your right to make this choice. However, I can hold whatever opinions I so desire: and do.)
As I’ve figured out ways of being who I am, or accepting who I am, I’ve been more or less comfortable with my name, which you could see play out on how well I responded when someone said my name, how many unrelated nicknames I had online. As I’ve been happy or unhappy, I’ve liked different names. Were it easier to legally change your name, I’m not sure what I would be called now. I suspect I would change my name fairly regularly. I wish we had a culture where people chose new names a few times in their lives. My name ties me to myself more than anything else except this actual body I am in.
It’s funny — this name my parents half-picked before I was born, changed when my father misunderstood my uncle as my mother was ill, chosen without knowing me — these names become so integral to identity, so tied in with who you are, despite being shared with so many other people. And yet I often lack other words for description.
