This is a chance lad. You can pick a name. One that will be yours alone. You can choose how you will be seen from now on.
--Niklaran Goldeye, Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce
Most people do not get to pick their names. Or perhaps I am wrong there. Many people choose to go by nicknames or middle names if they do not like heir given names. When people transition from one gender to another they often pick a new name better suited to their gender identity. And many other life transitions, like moving to a new city, can bring on the use of a new name. A friend of mine switched to using her middle name to distance herself from abusive family members. My 11th grade English teacher said she picked a new name in college. I once met an Elizabeth who was Beth as a child, and Eliza as an adult. And I have had no less than three students who went by names completely different than those on their official documents because that's how they felt comfortable. I suppose lots of people pick their names. I just never thought I would have ocassion to do so.
Okay, I did spend a lot of time as a child trying to get people to call me James and Joe and whatever else--usually characters from whatever piece of media I was obsessed with. And I did briefly fantasize about re-forging myself in college as this person who cos-played my own fictional characters as I was writing and went by those names. But there were too many people who knew me by then for these attempts--or fantasies--to ever gain ground. I'd say it's probably a good thing. Or that these names were never meant to stick.
And it wasn't that I disliked Molly, really. It was... servicable. It did everything a name is supposed to do. It was a badge of identity with one corner peeling off. It never bore to me the same weight as my middle name, Marjorie, which I was given in honor of my father's aunt, who spent the last 18 years of her life being one of my biggest role models and inspirations. I love my middle name so much, I felt an instant kinship with a college friend named Marjory--even when all I knew about her was name. I believe she and my great-aunt are the only two Marjories I've met in person.
Nor did my first name bear the same weight as my last name, Sroges, which was an attempted simplification by my great-grandfather, of his last name, sragauskas, when he arrived in the United States. Of couse great-grandpa didn't know that the sr consonant cluster, while common in his native language of Lithuanian, is unheard of in English, so my family has since faced a long history of misspellings and mispronunciations. By comparison, Molly is almost random. I'm sure it wasn't for my parents, but consider this: I was in my early twenties when I wrote a poem about Sroges--a poem I still routinely open sets with. And only a couple of years later I wrote a poem about Marjorie. I've never written a poem about Molly. It's so weightless it could almost float away.
And maybe it will. I've considered transitioning to Marjorie Sroges, Maggie for short (a nod to the other Marjorie in my life). This would eliminate the problem I always had of wanting to honor both names, and struggling with how to do so. When I finish my conversion, I could even insert by Hebrew name as a "middle name," which in turn would be like braiding three parts of my identity together--identity from my father, identity from myself, and identity from my mother.
As I said before, I never imagined needing to choose my own name, but eventually, I will be, and I don't embark on this quest lightly. I keep returning to this scene from The Circle of Magic, my favorite book series, in which one of the characters, a street thief named Roach, is given a chance at a new life in a new country. And he's told he must pick a new name. Roach loves plants. In the five pages we've spent with him, we've seen him befriend a growing patch of moss in the prison cell he is continously thrown into and have chunks of his hand ripped out by thorny vines. So he chooses the name Briar Moss.
The name is representative of him not only because we have seen him interact with these two plants specifically, but because he has a tough exterior protecting something softer. In fact, this book series is filled with name changes, as adepts at magic, upon receiving their mage credentials, have the opportunity to choose a mage name (giving us such beauties as Niklaren Goldeye, Wulfric Snaptrap, and Olennika Potcracker). But Briar's name fits him so well that when he receieves his credential, he doesn't need a new name.
So picking a name for myself is more than picking a name that I like and certainly more than finding a name that is similar to my first name. And no shade to those for whom these methods work. The Circle of Magic's Dedicate Frostpine, who detests the cold, picked his name because he thought the trees were pretty. There's no one correct way to pick a Hebrew name. But I keep thinking of Niko's words to Briar--that he had a chance to recreate himself. A chance that might never come again. And so I know I won't be satisfied until I find my Briar Moss.
