An Other Name
on aliases
An Other Name
Not long ago, at Starbucks with my daughter, I told the barista my name was Jill. Bailey looked at me sideways and laughed. “What’s that all about?”
“You can’t ruin Jill,” I said.
Having been with me at Panera when my order was announced for, “Kin? Kine?” before the frustrated voice on the intercom finally said, “Order 9738 is ready,” she knew. She’d witnessed other occasions when a confused clerk would write, “S-i-n” even as I spelled aloud, “C-y-n.”
But I know – those of us with odd names or unconventional spellings are legion.
My nickname growing up was the diminutive of Cynthia, and for my first couple of decades that sufficed. During adolescence, I experimented with spellings – Cyn-dee, Sindie, Cyndi – but none stuck for very long. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I chafed against my name and never really felt as if I had been given the right one.
When I enrolled at Carl Sandburg College in my 30s, one teacher referred to me as Cynthia. I corrected him, uncomfortable with the moniker I’d only heard used when I was in trouble.
“I don’t care,” he’d said. “It’s your name and a good one at that.”
My perspective began to shift. The sound of Cynthia set well in my ear. In time, that’s how I introduced myself but then a new set of problems emerged. Those who’d always known me as “Cindy” bristled, and those to whom I’d been introduced to as Cynthia assumed the common nickname. I cherished friends who went along with me but I irritated many others.
After marrying a man named Kitchen, I enrolled in graduate school. Since I was pursuing a writing degree, I relished the boon of the pen name Cyn Kitchen. I couldn’t have dreamed that one up if I’d tried.
Writer friends envied its distinctiveness while I continued to meet furrowed brows from the perplexed who wondered if they’d heard me right. “You know, Cyn, like the fall of man,” I’d joke. My sister had called me “Sin” in the heat of childhood arguments to goad me into hysteria. It often worked. The irony is not lost on me.
Those who fail to see humor in my name, or maybe see too much, out themselves by sticking to Cynthia as if merely uttering “Cyn” is one. A few stubborn holdouts revert to my childhood name, habits they either can’t or won’t kick.
Of course I get it. Of course, I know that there isn’t another soul in the world whose name is Cyn Kitchen, that it sounds like a punchline, or that it might allude to content on the dark web, but anyone who knows me knows differently.
Even my very stubborn mother was faithful to call me what I preferred without my having to hound her.
Still, the burden of a problematic name follows me. That’s why sometimes I’d rather be Jill. Who knows. In fact, if you yell it at me across a crowded room, my ears will perk up and I’ll reply, “Here I am!”