I always thought it was strange that we’re given names at birth. I mean if you really think about it all you are at birth is this wrinkly blob of skin who can do virtually nothing but breath, eat, poop, and cry. How can enough personality be visible for a parent to know who gets to be called what? I’m told it doesn’t matter – a child grows into their name… but this is clearly not always the case. I knew a lot of kids growing up who asked to be called by their initials, or their middle name, or a nickname which often had no bearing to their given name and most of these people carried on like this into adulthood to the point that if you didn’t know better you’d think you were calling them by their given name.
I was named after a lamp. Tiffany. I was also given a name that was experiencing an intense surge in popularity at the time. There was a monsoon of Tiffanys born even in the tiny town I was living in. I hated sharing my name with so many others and by the time I was a teenager I was getting annoyed with people jokingly asking if I was a stripper paying my way through college. That’s what Tiffany had come to mean in the collective conscious of the US. UGH.
I didn’t believe I could get away with being called a different name altogether but I decided at the age of twelve I was going to start spelling it Typhani to my friends, family, and that one French pen pal who made half the letters in the alphabet look like one character to begin with. This was a pivotal time in my life. Everything was changing. I moved out of the home of my childhood into another, I changed schools, my mother went from being a single mom to a married mom and I gained a step dad I wasn’t appreciative of at the time, I hit the dreaded years of puberty, and to top it all off that’s also the same year I started getting sick with a mysterious chronic illness that soon devoured the rest of my life. By the time I was forced to quit school because of this I had stopped spelling it the old fashioned way on everything except legal documents.
Everyone thought it was a phase or I was being cute. I was not. At nineteen I looked around and realized I had maintained almost no part of my childhood growing up – not friends, not hobbies or interests, not school. I had basically given that all up years ahead of schedule. While my friends went off to college and faced this schism in their realities I’d already been there for years. The turmoil that was my life in those years had changed everything about me and I felt the name Tiffany had no relevance to my life. Whoever that person was died a long time ago along with her enthusiasm, her passion, her belief in humanity and the sciences. She was sweet and nieve, young and energetic. By this time I had lost hope – without an education I felt even if I did get better a real career was probably well out of reach and since I felt so utterly abandoned by everyone I knew as my friends I had become intensely cynical on the nature of humanity. I was downright curmudgeonly. My zest for life was replaced with a dark and dry sense of humor that let everyone who saw it know I was pretty fucking broken. Life had changed me.
“Are you SURE you want to change your name?” The judge asked me the day I made it legal. “You’ll have to spell it out to courtesy callers on the phone. People will mispronounce it.”
I know, I was still baby-faced, blonde, shy, and probably looked like another stupid teenager to this guy.
“Yes, I am SURE.” I didn’t speak up to say that having an unpronounceable name has its perks – for one you immediately know who is a courtesy caller when you pick up the phone and they ask if Ms Typhoon/Tyler/Tycoon/Tie-Phanny is in. I definitely didn’t tell him I had been spelling my name like this since I started becoming my own person, for years, or that I felt it was far more suiting of me than anything else. I didn’t tell him I had a mind of my own, that I had thought long and hard, and that yes, this was the only option left for me. I would now.
In fact as I sit here I look back over the year past and once again cannot recognize who I used to be. You see my life got better for a bit – I fell in love, we moved into a home of our own, my health improved, I started running a farm, and I thought my future was set. That’s when, after five years and suspiciously two months after talking about marriage, my boyfriend came home, announced he loved someone else and that I no longer had a place here. I was forced to give up everything I had worked on and all the progress I made. I had no other option, being on the pittance that is disability in the US, but to move back home with my mother – into the house that I am pretty sure made me sick in the first place. I watched as within a matter of a few months any progress I made with my health went to absolute shit. I was back to being in agony most of the time.
But this past year has been the best year of my life. As it turns out that break up was the best thing that ever happened to me. How?! Believe me no one was more surprised than myself but freed from the burden of keeping someone else happy I decided to do everything I wanted to do – on my own, with my own pace, for myself. I got a cheap car, I saved every penny for gas and I started traveling and chronicalling my journeys on a blog. I started to talk to people, complete strangers, something I had never done before since having this crippling illness usually left me feeling too worthless to want to talk. It was a black hole of a social anxiety and suddenly it was gone. I grew a spine. I was able to say no to people for the first time in my life. I dyed my hair orange and started to just be unrepentantly me and nothing else. I stopped trying to be what everyone else wanted me to be and in that I suddenly became bad-ass. I became who I always wanted to be – confident, well spoken, adventurous, independent, and absolutely joyous. Somehow I reconnected with what life was about – it wasn’t about pain and misery it was about those few fleeting moments where you are not miserable. It’s about connection to other people. It’s about believing in yourself.
I don’t know where I’m going or where I’ll end up. I admit the future is still a very tedious prospect for me and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes worry or feel scared but that’s not going to stop me. I’m going to charge my way through one way or another and in the end I do believe I will end up where I belong. In the meantime I find myself at that intersection again. Do I change my name again? Because I don’t feel like Typhani anymore. I’m not the same shy hero-worshipping adult-child that took on that name. I’m my own person now and I’ll be damned if I follow anyone else ever again. I’m too busy blazing my own path and that is something so foreign and new I feel it deserves a moniker of its own.
And that’s why I am starting to introduce myself as Theophanes, Theo for short. It means “A manifestation of God to a person.” I don’t know if I saw God per se but I have become very spiritual, very one with the nature that surrounds me, and I can feel the overwhelming connectivity of everything now. Theophanes is also the name Tiffany originated from so it gives a gentle bow to both the names I once carried. There’s power in these ideas and even more in choosing your own name. It’s a sign you have become something wholly yourself. I strongly suggest it for anyone who finds themselves looking into the mirror and wondering who is looking back.