The day I moved into my college dorm, I changed my name. It wasn’t some carefully planned strategy. It was, I think, the expression of something deep inside me that I hadn’t said even to myself up until that moment.
The flurry of recent news around the white girl Rachel Dolezal who became the black girl Rachel Dolezal brings this experience back to me. I have some inkling of the itch that might generate such a shift. “I identify as black,” she says,even though her parents are white and her childhood photos depict a white girl. She claims, though, that she would draw herself using brown crayons and with black curly hair, from very early on.
I grew up as Lee Ann. “You are named after your two grandmas,” Mom would tell me as I cuddled on her lap in the big rocker in the dining room. That connection to Irma Lee and Anna Mae shaped me. Lee Ann was the responsible one, the goody-two-shoes, the talented but plain girl.
Renaming myself “Lee” changed my identity in ways that have both overtly and surreptitiously affected every day for me, ever since.
I don’t recall that I had any plan to do this. But that day already marked a decided shift in my life. Mom and Dad delivered my stuff and me to a dorm room in Burge Hall, which housed more people than my entire hometown. I didn’t know a soul there. I spent a desultory hour arranging things in my closet and drawers and then made myself walk down the hall to see who I would meet. Halfway down that corridor, just inside a room where I could hear two girls talking, and in the split second between that first “Hi, I’m” and speaking my name, I chose to say just “Lee.” It was a moment of brilliance, an unrepeatable opportunity that I am so glad I seized.
I’m not certain what “Lee” represented then, or now. I’m still the responsible one, still that “good girl,” the talented but plain one. But Lee is more independent than Lee Ann was. She’s a little less predictable. Stronger. More her own person. Creative, and a leader. Lee Ann might have been able to be all those things. But I’m not certain she would have been.
In my re-naming there was no fabricating, no speaking for persons whose experiences I do not share. Still there was some push-back. It took my mother a long time to call me just Lee. She worried that dropping the “Ann” in some ways dishonored my Grandma Roorda. I did, too, a little. Some long-ago friends and cousins still call me “Lee Ann.” But the changing (claiming?) of my identity as Lee didn’t involve the dislocation and, in some ways, deception that it did for Rachel Dolezal. I’m glad for that. It’s hard enough to figure out and be who we are without the world questioning our authenticity.
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