When I entered education, and later employment, I found that there was always someone else, usually multiple people, with the same forename as me and always someone with the same surname as me. So the thing that had until then specifically meant me, now turned out to mean a lot of different people and the usual irritating confusions occurred where I would constantly respond to a summons that turned out not to be about me. My name was not unique, far from it. However, I hardly ever met anyone who had two middle names. This part of my name became the interesting bit. So whenever I wrote out my name, I would be sure to include my middle initials, until seeing my forename and surname without the middle initials was almost unrecognisable.
Since so many people did share my first name, most of them would adapt it to a varying pet form in order to stand out. Since they had already resorted to that, it meant that by keeping my name in its full form actually made it different. However, it is three syllables long and apparently most people become cripplingly fatigued having to say a whole three syllables and have to contract the name they are saying. Without permission. Every time I met a new person, they would, without asking, contract my name because of their own laziness or assumptions or pushy familiarity. I really didn’t like this. It felt like they were not respecting me, which is probably connected to my issues with gender etc. To make matters worse, most name-contractions are just the first syllable, but for some reason with my name, it was the middle syllable. Since the first letter of my name was my favourite, having it stripped away without consent was even more infuriating. Thus most people’s first impression of me was that I was incredibly grumpy or volatile and uptight.
One time I went to camp, and discovered that the new tent-mates had written a sign with our names on it, and had just assumed they could put that pet name that didn’t belong to me. I tried to explain how meaningless it was, that if they were just going to randomly assign me with a different name, it might as well actually contain that nice letter at the start of my name. Thus for a week, I was known as Rocky, and I loved it. But when I returned home after camp, Rocky was left behind.
Years later when I was at university, my friend and I were looking at keyrings in a shop, and under the space for my name, someone had randomly placed a keyring with ‘Jacob’ on it. So forever more my friend referred to me as Jacob. Whenever she says it, I feel warm inside. Because I know when she says ‘Jacob’ she means me, me and no one else. This is her special name for me.
I never felt that kind of happiness when anyone said my given name, even when they bothered saying the whole thing.
In fact, at school, I was most attached to my third name. Whenever we played a game or wrote a play, I named the self with my third name. This was where I felt all my personality lived. Possibly because it began with my favourite letter of the alphabet, possibly because it was hiding in there right at the back, often left off of forms that couldn’t cope with giving people more than two names, it was kind of like my secret identity, possibly because it was the shortest, plainest of my names, only one consonant longer than the initial sound and that initial sound doubled as a gender neutral name, and therefore was the least feminine.
Because despite having the variety of three names all to the self, they were all feminine names. My first name didn’t even have a masculine equivalent. I was fascinated by gender neutral names as a child. When I was little, I named all the toys Sammy and Joey so that their sex/gender could be interchangeable. When I was a little older, I was mesmerised by girls and women called Jamie or Sean. I longed to have a name like that, a name that didn’t tell strangers anything about you. But I didn’t have any among my names that I could use that wouldn’t tell everyone upfront what my sex, which as far as I can tell is none of their business, was.
As a teenager, I was openly determined to change my surname when I left school. I don’t have a problem with the father’s side of the family, but we’ve never been close so I didn’t feel I had a loyalty to the name. In fact, due to my sex, it was assumed that I would change it one day anyway. It was also a particularly dull name. As a kid, you’d have to write stories explaining where a name came from, but mine was too boring to do that. There was nothing mysterious or interesting about it. It was a noun. End of story. It was also slightly difficult to say. It had no hard consonants in it, and the shrillest of the vowels and whenever I said it over the phone, I would be asked to repeat it and finally spell it, because evidently I was just saying ‘ffffllluuurrhhhh’ or something instead of pronouncing it correctly. A surname should tell a story. It should be strong and exciting. It should be something you could imagine a knight being called. My surname did nothing. It was short, soft and indescribably dull and obvious, as well as really common. Ugh. But that wasn’t why I wanted to change my name back then. That just made it easier. I wanted to change my name as a teenager, because I felt everything I did and said was wrong. I was so confused as to who I was (because of my gender and sexuality issues) that I just wanted to wipe it all clean when I found out and start again fresh.
However, once I had left school behind, I had decided I wanted to become an author, and I had this stupid fantasy of all the people who hadn’t believed in me in the past seeing my name in a bookshop and being put in their place. So because of that, I stuck with a name I had wanted to ditch.
Then my wonderful tutor, author and poet Christopher Meredith, started calling me by my surname in class. I guess he probably called us all by our surnames, but again here was a gender neutral term that meant me, and I liked it. The new friends started calling me by my surname with a ‘The’ on the front and this gave me a renewed connection with my surname for a while.
However, after uni I took a couple of jobs which did not play to the strengths and I was still dealing with a lot of inner ‘who am I’ confusion, and colleagues repeatedly forgot who I was or didn’t recognise me. After being in one job for three years, a colleague asked me if it was my first day. I quit pretty much that day. In another job I worked for two or three years, the colleagues were still forgetting my name, or calling me Sarah for unknown reasons, and again there were multiple people with my forename and my surname and I felt like I was losing the identity.
Eventually I quit that job and kept one where I was respected and valued, and around the same time I had come to terms with the sexuality and gender, and I felt like I had finally discovered the self. Except that whenever someone said my name, it was like I was hearing them from another room. It was weird. I saw them saying it, but it held no meaning. The only part of my name that had any connection to me by this time were those cherished middle initials and maybe my third name generally, although it was still too feminine for me. I reached a point where I felt weird and distant and cold and confused and lonely because I didn’t identify with my own name.
I no longer wanted that book with that name on it. That represented a past in which I had been unhappy. When I got a book published, I wanted it to have a new name. One that I liked. I am not sure where Conrad came from originally. Maybe I just like that it starts with ‘Con’. I wrote a short story at university with Conrad as the lead; he was an underhand gambler and it was a mildly fourth wall story because I basically wrote it as an answer to a famous story, because I wanted to unkill a character I sympathised with. I brought him back later in my children’s MS working title: Evelynland, this time as a woman. In both stories Conrad filled the same purpose. But while I was writing Evelynland, I came to realise that I wanted Conrad for the self. So I took it. Which means the one in Evelynland had to have a new name. The surname was easy. I had always been Conrad deep down. The only other name I might consider is Maxwell, but I can’t see where it could fit.
I would have been quite happy to just be 'Conrad' for the rest of the life, but in British society you can’t just have one name. So I needed a forename to go with Conrad. Something gender neutral of course, and my favourite middle initial would stay. But I worked on that for a while and nothing felt right. Until eventually I realised that I didn’t need a ‘new’ name. Because any name I picked would always be a kind of weird mask. What I needed was my name. What was the only part of my name that ever made me happy?
And that is how I became LJ Conrad. At first I only changed it socially and as my pen name. But eventually it became complicated using two names, so I changed it legally.
(Side note: I think titles are completely pointless in this day and age, but I wasn’t very happy on reaching adulthood to find that I was a ‘Miss’ despite never agreeing to be one. What the hell has either my sex or my marital status got to so with people I don’t know? Generally I tried to go by ‘Ms’ which caused people confusion because actual people in this day and age think it means you're divorced, and then I found out about ‘Mx’ – I’d still rather have no title, but if I must have one, then I’ll take the neutral one. So my official title is ‘Mx’ - it's on my driving license and everything.) (Although I’d really prefer ‘The’.)
And here’s the thing. People have been calling me LJ Conrad for several years now. Multiple times a day. And every time someone calls me LJ, I feel this wonderful warm tingling feeling inside. Every time I hear my name, I hear that person saying, “I see you. You exist and I respect your choices.” I never felt like that before, and now I get to feel it every day.
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