Prompt: My name is…

I chose my name myself. I even went to court and made it legal.

My parents had given me a name that was ill-fitting and, in retrospect, I was trying to distance myself from some very serious trauma in my late teens. I wanted to be a different person than the one those Bad Things happened to. Later, it became clear that the name I grew up with (Sherry) ended up being very dated. That made me feel even better about the change.

Do you know what did not make me feel good? The fit my parents threw about the change. It has now been 32 years that they have continued to call me the name they gave me. I cobbled together a terrible middle name that incorporated my birth name, all to appease them. If I had known that wasn’t going to work, I would have picked something I loved.

For that matter, my chosen first name (Mia) was not one I loved more than any other. I was trying to be reasonable by picking something fairly normal, if not mainstream at the time. And it was one that would be easy for speakers of other languages to pronounce. I was in college off-and-on at the time as a foreign languages and literatures major with a 3-language concentration. My primary language was Spanish and Italian was my secondary. I hadn’t settled on the third yet. I took that into consideration because I imagined my future life being full of interactions in those languages.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have picked a name I truly love and I wouldn’t have given myself a horrible middle name. It’s not like my parents ever accepted the change and that future full of international conversation never quite materialized.

The moral of this story is that you should be as unreasonable as you want to be if you’re only being reasonable to make other people happy. Or less mad.