I used to hate my name, growing up. I think this is common, amongst the cohost cohort, for a variety of reasons – names as predestinate weights strapped to the idea of your person. Lately, though, there's a joy in it the way i find joy in so many parts of #the variety of the human experience. I like the shape of it; i've always liked the hard closing consonant as a way to say "the name is done."
This morning, though, someone called me "Julie", and it threw me for a loop. That's what my mom calls me! That's the old joke when i used to have a pair of glasses on my nose and a second on the top of my head - "julie two pairs", which no one ever called me except in jest. It's an aesthetic choice – much like conserving the name "juliet" regardless of gender or pronoun. It's a queer thing, accessible to the weight of history. Joyce in Ulysses says "she died, for literature, before she was born", which was a canny idea; that "juliet" as a metaphysical idea came into being – was a figure of note and therefore a figure worth writing down, and later performing – because she would be dead. I like to defy this prognostication with my little life while I can; I am alive, with or without literature, for all my years after I was born.
What is in a name, I ask, as a juliet? I get to ask this question – I inherit its inevitability. We do not choose every part of our patrimony, or patronymy, but I think we at least can choose our own questions.
