My elementary school self was certain they could see our future, something my current self often finds muddled and nebulous. They had the privilege of looking forward through a bay window, while I am now stuck staring through a peephole, often fogged by my breath.
In ways, this vision was comically optimistic. They drew diagrams of the six-story house we were meant to inhabit, named our four children (Alexandria, Kathleen, Nicholas, and Nathaniel), while strangely ignoring the presence of a husband (interesting), and decided we were going to be a full-time author, a dream that has been nearly abandoned. We would write books from the seclusion of our attic bedroom and traipse down the stairs for meals prepared by our housekeeper, seemingly certain that our legs would work forever. Or perhaps this home had an elevator—one can only wonder as the diagrams have been lost to time, or maybe, to the greedy maw of a school trash can.
Part of this was just playing pretend, toying with the idea of an alter ego, of splitting a life between fame and the familiar. But the other part of it was that my younger self could not imagine a world where they could be the one to fulfill those dreams.
Yet, this was not “my” future, not a house that my elementary school self ever really thought they would inhabit. Even the books I would write wouldn’t be truly mine. I crafted a pen name and a persona to go along with it, imagining that I would don a wig, take off my glasses, and transform to perform writerly duties. Part of this was just playing pretend, toying with the idea of an alter ego, of splitting a life between fame and the familiar. But the other part of it was that my younger self could not imagine a world where they could be the one to fulfill those dreams. It would not be me on the author’s flap, but instead, my eyes peering through a constructed face.
CJ was a promise for a later time, something not to be tainted by the current moment.
Though I eventually dropped the initial pen name, I quickly found a newer, more authentic one. CJ. My initials. A revelation. I remember scrawling it across the covers of my composition notebooks, debating whether I liked its simplicity interrupted by periods, trying to create an autograph with my limited cursive. And yet, even still, this was not me. I had decided that CJ was a name for the future. A name I had to earn. A name I had to be cool enough to use. The future CJ I imagined was still an alter ego, part of another bisected life. I tried the name on for size at a few summer camps, deeply confusing my mother when she came to pick me up. Still, every time someone did call me CJ, those two syllables were accompanied by both an overwhelming rush of joy and a nagging sense of discontent. CJ was a promise for a later time, something not to be tainted by the current moment.
In high school, when I realized that my old notions of my gender identity no longer fit (and maybe never had), some friends started calling me CJ. It still felt odd, still felt wrong at times. I wondered if I was lying to myself, if I was just deluding myself into thinking that the name fit. Were people referring to me or to some performance, some projection? Yet, CJ started to feel less like something I would just slip on when it came time and more like something deep and internal: not a half of myself but the whole. And with college on the horizon, I knew only one of these personas could prevail.
I remember writing CJ in the preferred name section on my college applications, just on a whim at first. Whenever someone could look over my shoulder and see my screen, I quickly deleted it, but I could feel its absence, the little white box waiting, still and patient, for those two letters to return. And when I typed it back in, I foresaw a day where it would not be preferred but fully mine, not placed second, not trapped between quotation marks and labeled as merely a nickname. I did not want to give anyone a choice of which name to use, did not want anyone to doubt its authenticity. I had spent too long telling myself that it could never be. That I would never be good or deserving enough.
But it belonged, in part, to a younger version of myself: someone who could envision all the furnishings of an ostentatious manor but could not envision a world where they felt comfortable as themself.
In college, I decided to go by CJ, no longer caring if I deserved it or if I was cool enough. Seeing that name on my acceptance letters (and even my rejection letters) had cemented my decision. It was time to imagine a future that I could definitively claim, though I would likely never own a six-story house or have four children. If I had created the very metrics that I measured myself against, I could choose to cast them aside, though admittedly, the old urge to compare myself to an imagined paragon still appears at times. My friends in college have never known me by any name other than CJ, although I do occasionally run into people from high school who knew me before this reinvention. In those moments, I am startled by recollections of a past, not forgotten but discordant with my current life. Though it stings a bit to hear, my birth name does not feel quite like a dead name, something that I will just cast aside forever. It is definitely not my name anymore; perhaps it never really was. But it belonged, in part, to a younger version of myself: someone who could envision all the furnishings of an ostentatious manor but could not envision a world where they felt comfortable as themself.
I do not want to live a life in two parts, no longer desiring to hide behind wigs and pen names, but at times, my younger self feels detached from who I am now. And though I often see their face in photos, I wonder if I would recognize them if we were in the same room. If they would recognize me. I have cut my hair, lost my glasses, and pierced my ears. Would they be in awe of who we have become? Would they deem me cool enough to deserve my name? Would I find their persistent, unmedicated anxiety overwhelming? Would they find me overly brash and strange, my music too loud, my smile too wide? Perhaps we would be strangers to each other, connected only by the spiral of our fingerprints and the curl of our hair. But would that be a bad thing?
