Today’s reverb10 prompt:
New name. Let’s meet again, for the first time. If you could introduce yourself to strangers by another name for just one day, what would it be and why?
This prompt was kind of amusing for me because it brought back all my childhood frustrations with my first name. It’s fairly uncommon among people my age — I’ve only ever met two or three other Natalies — and when I was a young child, I wished I had a more ordinary name that people would know how to spell and pronounce.
To my great mortification in junior high school, when The Facts of Life TV show started in 1979, everyone knew the name Natalie — attached to “the fat girl” on the show. Not exactly the association any junior high girl wants with her name, and especially not a chunky one like myself.
In high school I yearned for a sleek, one or two-syllable, modern, vaguely androgynous name like Alex or Kirby.
In college I realized how difficult it is to enunciate my name clearly in a noisy environment. It’s often misheard as Maddy, Pattie, or Sarah Lee. But at least Natalie Merchant was with 10,000 Maniacs, providing a much better name-recognition alternative.
But I never really considered changing my name — the issues I had with it became less and less important as I got older.
But then in 2004, when I started blogging pseudonymously for a few years, I did pick a one-syllable vaguely androgynous name as my pseudonym. That was fun, although what I enjoyed about blogging under a pseudonym had less to do with the name itself than with the freedom I felt from its thin disguise.
Blogging is different now in 2010 (almost 2011!) — different voices and different technologies have altered the landscape. I dropped out for a couple years in order to handle Real Life and to figure out what else I wanted to say and how. Coaching turned out to be one answer to those questions, as did exploring different kinds of writing projects.
I’m fairly indifferent to my name now, as a name — (although I will note that the one time I tried to read a novel with a character named Natalie, I just couldn’t do it. How do people named John or Jennifer manage this?) — but in terms of a writing space, this blog is certainly different.
I’m curious to see what unfolds.