Names, Revisited.

Resolving this plurality of selves.

22 min read

Just now

A series of medium-sized canvases lay together on a white shelf, each painted with a different glimpse of a river view: eye level in the middle of the water, beneath the bow of a large evergreen tree, in the distance with a mountain rising in the background, a shot of a clear blue sky with the faint shadow of birds, a close-up of pine needles on the ground, the reflection of the water in the sun, and so on. The canvases are stacked and partially cover one another but never form a full image. — A photo of an installation of Cynthia Daignault’s “At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky)”.

I’ve changed my name a lot of times. At eighteen, I legally changed my last name from Bohannon to Price, cementing an estrangement between myself and my father so solidly that it might have made him kill himself, though I’ll never know for sure. A few years after that, I got my PhD. A few years after that, I changed my first and middle names and my gender, and by that point there was no longer any resemblance between the identity I’d been born with and the one that I’d constructed like an exoskeleton and nestled myself inside.

I have switched up identities like I’m updating web handles, like I am Don Draper changing the conversation. I didn’t like me, so I gave the world a better story. And I was a good storyteller, so it all became true.

Eventually though, my constructed identity became a brand — each word I’d attached to myself fused together into a single phrase that strangers would repeat at grocery stores and concert venues. Is that Xx. XXXXX XXXXX? It sure didn’t feel like I was. This name became so heavy with obligation. My soft innards could not pretend to be the armor that was supposed to protect it.

I’d never been a singular person inside, not really — there were all these different ways of being swirling in and out of the fore. Some of the truest feelings in me were…