Where nobody knows your name
It’s a unique feeling walking into a space where everybody knows who you were but no one knows who you are.
My entire life changed post transplant. Everything transformed in a way that was both disorienting and authenticating. Looking back on the person I was, I recognize her like I recognize a character in a story but not in a way that that was me. I have this sort of un-attachment from my old self, but that’s a story for another time.
I don’t respond to my birth name anymore, to the point that if someone uses it to refer to me I don’t clue in that I’m being spoken to. If forced to use it, I will “mispronounce” it to avoid saying the name that carries so much memory but not in a nostalgic way. In navigating that transition, my therapist referred to it as my dead name. The person that existed with that name isn’t me, and naming myself became a ritual I used to usher myself into a new way of being. When someone uses it in conversation, stumbling over the syllables, it feels as if they are performing an elaborate ritual to resurrect the dead, and even though I know she’s not there anymore, they don’t.
This recent arrival in a room where only my old self was known was like being asked to perform a version of me that isn’t there anymore. I’m asked to perform a lot of things due to the intersection of my identity - wellness, cultural assimilation, gender norms - and each adaptation feels like a side step away from groundedness. The weight of being referred to in ways that no longer fit my identity felt heavy. Like a snake having shed old skin only to be forced to return, this moment felt similar in constriction. It felt like a funeral everyone else refuses to attend while they are still dancing with the corpse of who they remembered.
I’ve been thinking about all of the ways in which we perform identity for others, and what reclaiming that identity might feel like. I hold the truth on my tongue even as I know it will make other people uncomfortable, and I swallow it having learned the comfort of others is more important than my embodied truth. I absorb the emotional labour, even when it feels like scratching at the surface.
As humans, we are uncomfortable with the dramatic shifting of shapes that we cannot pin down into a singular definition. We prefer people as concepts, not humans. Humans are messy. Humans hold contradictions.
I’ve been on both sides: watching someone change into a person I do not remember, and being the one who has shape shifted. Allowing such a transition demands a lack of control. It’s the foundation of unconditional love and the requirement of meeting someone where they are at instead of forcing our own ideologies onto their skin.
And what is the alternative? To ask someone to inhabit a shape that no longer fits them because it soothes our own discomfort?
It’s just a name, I’m told. It takes a while for someone to come around to an identity shift, especially in someone they once knew. And yet every time it feels like an avoidance in getting to know the person I am now.
Resurrection rarely looks the same as it once did, but in my resurrection story it is preferable to others that they can make sense of the story. We do this all the time, white washing complexity until it is comprehensible.
As if stories are black and white fact books and not roadmaps of survival.
