Semi-Random Reflections

Read time: 5 mins.

“What syllables should I combine to get your attention?”

Surely that’s all a name is for some people. It’s certainly all most of 21^st century western society appears to expect from names, apart from a few administrative processes that use our names as labels for tracking us while we run through the paper jungle.

Dismissive as those uses may sound, they do endow names with subtle but considerable power. Even if you attach no personal meaning to your name, it still directs attention to and from you. People who want to influence your life in whatever way can still usually do so more effectively if they know your name. Your name mistakenly used on a death certificate may not literally kill you, but it can lock you out of some pretty significant parts of your life if it gets far enough. It’s the still the word that hangs in people’s minds to solidify their concept of you. It carries etymological baggage whether anyone acknowledges that baggage or not.

People who decide to change their names undoubtably understand this better than anyone, except perhaps people who have been asked or ordered to change their name and refused. For all the power names have, our birth names are among the first things other people drop on us without our consent. Nicknames and married names can sometimes come the same way: uninvited but loaded with resounding implications nonetheless. Nothing irritates quite like hearing other people deliberately identify you with a name you’ve told them you don’t want. It’s as though the other person thinks they can replace you as the chief expert on your entire existence, because, consciously or not, who and what we are is tangled up with our names. Conversely, asserting a name you did choose is an act of great personal power. It says, “I alone decide my definition and I have the willpower to project that definition into the word.”

The same can also be true of choosing to keep/accept a given name, whenever/however the name comes. Given names and chosen names need not be mutually exclusive categories. If you considered your relationship to the name and consciously said, “Yes, this suits,” then you chose that name. This too is an expression of agency.

Of course, you can absolutely adore your birth name and still have practical reasons for not wanting to use it to use it for everything. Countless artists down through the millennia have found their creative potential enhanced by skillfully applied pseudonyms. Several have had multiple pseudonyms they used simultaneously. On one level, this can be a fun way of letting lesser-expressed parts of yourself out to play, akin to trying on costumes. On another level, pseudonyms can serve more practical purposes. While there are contexts in which using a name other than your “real” one is not only risky but highly suspicious, there are also situations when using your real one carries its own kind of danger. The internet is disturbingly fraught with such situations. When something has so much influence over your life, the person wielding it most deliberately should be you.

I’d argue what separates pseudonyms from what I’m calling chosen names is attachment and intent. While pseudonyms are technically names we choose, there’s a difference between a name permanently showcased as a self-portrait and a name periodically draped over that portrait for protection, between a name that fully replaces a previous one and a name that only masks a current one. I’d also argue given names can perform the functions of pseudonyms when they’re retained for the purpose of keeping a chosen name under wraps until it can be safely revealed. There’s nothing to stop pseudonyms evolving into fully realized chosen names, either.

One of my teachers put me onto the concept of a secret name, a name you choose solely for yourself and keep private. This becomes the name that anchors the part of yourself you don’t let anyone else touch. There are no rules around this name except that it should please you and that you should guard it the way you’d guard a box containing your soul. That way no one can hijack its meaning, no one can distort its pronunciation, and if you decide later that it’s not serving you anymore, the decision to change it doesn’t belong to anybody but you. I suspect there are more people who keep their chosen names in this box than anyone realizes.

It’s no coincidence that this reflection follows so closely on the heels of my connecting a new pseudonym to this blog. Let’s call it a wild hair I took. This pseudonym hasn’t become my “everyday” name; it would defeat too many of its purposes if it did. I also wouldn’t apply this pseudonym to my previously published works even if I could, neither do I plan on applying it to quite all my future projects, but there’s work I’m asking it to do for this and some adjacent corners of my art. For the record, I’ve edited some previous comments on this blog to reflect the new pseudonym. The name was all I changed. Thanks for indulging another tentative scribble on the canvas.