It was about a decade ago that I received confirmation the pen name I had chosen several years before then, Maria Ian, was the correct one for me. I hit on a breath of air during a hypnosis session for trauma recovery. The soft wave that delicately unfurled for a nanosecond before it dissipated provided clear indication; there I was, with “Ian” adumbrated in a fleeting sketch of freedom. Somewhere in the depth I had found a trace of me.
That realization was helpful for the coming period of my life, as people questioned why I used a last name different from my legal one. As most of you know, people can be terribly uninformed and ignorant of meanings attached to a name!
That got on my nerves at times. Until about a month ago, when I began receiving enthusiastic messages from a genealogy researcher who had found something amazing. My grandfather, who I thought had given me my last legal name, had changed his last name on his school record the year he dropped out of high school. It was an extraordinary find for the genealogy researcher to have located a high school record as old. On it was spelled my grandfather’s original last name, before he had changed it. His original name had “Ian” in it, like the melody of a poem carried by a very high wind.
That was truly extraordinary, because the name with “Ian” resonating in it was not at all common in the geographical region where my grandfather allegedly originated. His new assumed name, my legal last name, on the other hand, was very typical. So my grandfather’s new first name and last name read something like “John, John,” someone you could encounter on any street in those towns.
And it was extraordinary for several other reasons, primary among them that they allowed my grandfather to subsequently survive two World Wars, the first on the front lines and the second as a serially disenfranchised and deported individual, which made his sudden name change at such a young age very prescient! I had held the lifelong belief that the reason why he had survived was because of that dumb, common “John, John” name. But now I can see, in my mind’s eye, his real name spread over geographies where it built eminent history and good sense.
All of which goes to say that the answer to who we truly are is much more than can be written on any paper.
