Names and Knowing

I will not change my name again, I say, except I probably will.

    My name was given to me in a time of enmeshment and codependency and extreme mistreatment, by the source of all of these things. I do not like my name. It makes me feel alienated and outside of things and just odd overall. I have only ever connected to one name, a name I gave myself, which is Ethan. I only stopped going by Ethan because to put it bluntly I got extremely depressed and lost in myself and ended up detransitioning for about a six month period, because for some reason I thought that’d be the only way to “get better”. Obviously it made it worse! Obviously that would make it worse. I then began transitioning again but went by my birth name for the longest time, which I hated. Before Ethan, by the way, I’d been through about 20 different names. I can never seem to settle, I hate them all! I really hate them all. Except for Ethan.

    Church makes me feel unserious, it makes me feel trapped. I hate introducing myself because it feels like I’m vomiting up The Ghost of Shame every time. I hate writing my name onto paper because it feels like I am writing down his name instead. I want to get rid of it. I want to be just myself again. 

    No, I cannot come out to my family and go by the name Church. No, I cannot come out to my workplace and go by the name Church. No, I cannot be a serious 26 year old man with a serious job and a serious life named Church. I will not write Church on my mortgage. That is not my name. That is the name he picked for me, that is not my name.

    But, oh well! What can you do! They will only take me even less seriously if I change my name Again. I feel like most people do not take my identity as a trans man seriously only because my journey has been so fluid. It has gone this way due to many factors, but overall I really just don’t think I’m a very stationary person. I don’t reside in just one place. I am many different things, but to you I am meant to be a man. I only ask you to see me this way, because with the template I am given, that is what I am.

    So I guess I will be Church for now, even though that is not my name, and I guess I will keep being whatever you see me as, even though most times…you are wrong.