it was a name I read in a book when I was ~11 or 12 and not terribly common then. for some reason I started using it for a character in my head. in my mid twenties, I realized that she was still there, and damn if she didn’t feel like a more real and whole person than me. she felt so much more vivid, vibrant, and concrete, but she was just a fantasy I’d live through when I was bored? I started to spend weeks at a time lost in daydreams that I later realized weren’t really about her but experiences through her, if that makes sense. but haha, very cis. over the next couple of years, those daydreams/dreams shifted and I started to see the chains/barbed wire on her that were constricting her. she was restrained and couldn’t grow or change and it was very apparent to me that it was something I was doing.

it broke down not long after that during an acid trip. I admitted to myself I was trans and needed to transition after a long conversation with her, and I spent a while wrestling with a name, but it was really a foregone conclusion – like what was I going to go with, someone else’s name?

so in a very real way, my name is genuinely, truly my name and has been for most of my life. I was just too disassociated and depersonalized to realize what had happened. it’s also really funny to me that my subconscious went with a deeply literal metaphor for repression. like, I think part of me just got really frustrated with how obtuse I was being and started to get more and more on the nose.