“In the past four years, that’s what everyone has been introduced to me with which I think is really cool.”
I like the idea of like creating who you are over time and like cultivating that so that people can see the most accurate version of you. Like, for example, I was given a super… A name that did not belong to the ethnic group I was born into which is a little strange, but it’s never something I really identified with because of this. Also for other reasons like gender expression and not wanting to be like uber feminine all the time. But what happened with this in part of my like creating an identity thing was my friend and I read a book like maybe in seventh grade. I’m not sure. And it was all about these people who were subverting gender norms and like the main character had this whole like lizard-related trope and like they kept getting called different kinda like lizard names and that was like something they found empowering because it was inhuman and strange and fun. And so my friend and I who really liked this book and identified with it because it’s like really relatable to us, we were like trying to struggle and figure out who we were outside of expectations and stuff. So we each gave each other like a little lizard nickname thing from the book and that’s how we would like write letters to each other with these fun names, to better represent what we felt like, and now that’s like the name that appears on my records and stuff. Not the one I was born with. Like, I don’t have a lizard name as my legal name, but it is like… In the past like four years, that’s what everyone has been introduced to me with which I think is really cool.