A Name By Any Other Name
Rachel wrote about her name, and I don’t have too much to say on this subject since I’ve already done so, but there’s one part I wanted to single out, when she mentions that your sign name isn’t something you get to choose yourself but is given after you are “at least somewhat acquainted with the person who’s giving the name”.
This naming-after-knowing paradigm seems to have some similarities with the experience of trans people who choose a new name as part of their transition. If you think about it, the approach of being named after you or someone else actually knows who you are makes a lot of sense. When you receive a name as a baby (effectively a blank slate of a human), how do you know that the name itself doesn’t influence who the person becomes?
As related in my post two years ago, it had been my everyday name for something like twenty years before I tired of having one name for my life and one name for officialdom. It wasn’t so much a name I got after I or anyone else knew me enough to name me as one that sort of grew organically if somewhat sideways out of an online handle, but it became over time far more synonymous with who I was than the name given to me on my birth certificate.
It went from a replacing one handle which reflected my sense of being behind in life with another which suggested a sense of infantilization and emptiness to an abbreviated version that eventually, for a time, then became an elaborate moniker that professed my uniqueness in a “fake it until you make it” sort of manner. In the end, it got reduced back to its simplest form.
Going back to 2019, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of “derailment”—“an uncomfortable disconnect between who we feel we are today, and the person that we believe we used to be”—because in point of fact I don’t much feel a stable and consistent sense of identity over the course of my life. I’ve come back to this again and again and again, even wondering In the context of maybe one day having completed the blog restoration project “just how many of me will there be”.
Theodore H Schwartz, writing for Psyche, edited by the selfsame Christian Jarrett with whom I opened the above post in which I learned of derailment:
But I’ve severed the brain in two and watched in amazement as my patients wake up feeling like their complete and undivided selves. When I first did this type of operation, I had fantasies that they might suddenly refer to themselves as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Thankfully, this never occurred. In the case of the magician, the assistant’s wellbeing is real, and the cutting is the trick. For the brain surgeon, the cutting is the real part, while the patient’s sense of a unified self is the illusion.
But in Schwartz’s telling, these patients don’t appear to experience anything like derailment, reporting instead that they are the same person before this severance as they were afterward.
My given name, for what it’s worth, came from the playwright Christopher Marlowe—described by Hallie Flanagan, then head of the Federal Theater Project, as “the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare” when pressed by Congressman Joe Starnes who was concerned Marlowe was a Communist—which also is why my nickname was Kit, not Chris. If I recall correctly, I might almost have been a Dante, or at least the name had been pitched, but I don’t know for whom I’d have been named in that case.
(Who was Christopher? Who would have been Dante? Who was Slowdog? Who was Baby-X? Who now is Bix?)
There’s something to be said for names given at birth to be considered at least somewhat provisional. Why shouldn’t your name be something you consider to be reflective of your sense of self? Indeed maybe some people’s names are meant to change several times over the course of their lives.
Rachel’s post leaves me wondering what names people would have chosen for themselves at different points of their lives, and what names they would choose for themselves today if they could.
Who were you?
Who are you?