The Name Changer

(Last Updated On: May 22, 2012)

Note: This might make more sense if you read Evil Girl Scouts Stole my Diary first.

My 6^th grade diary was read privately at first. The Girl Scouts passed my diary around to schoolmates who read it covertly in their damp wood-paneled suburban basements. It was only a matter of time, however, until “Sharon’s Diary” made its theatrical premiere and was read aloud on the playground over the course of several recesses.

By the time the staff seized my diary, everyone, including the third graders who had no idea what “it” was, knew who had made my Top 10 list of the “boys I’d do it with”.

Then the staff read my diary too.

What followed was a witch hunt. My name was not mud. It was worse. Sharon was a bitch. She was a slut.  I was universally hated for the things that I had written. My words made people furious. I wanted to explain and annotate my writing, to defend myself with more words, but it was like trying to swim in a tsunami.  All landmarks had vanished and I was sucked under, tangled in the awful debris.

The worst thing that I was, was correct. I was an observant kid. Certainly not all of what I wrote was right, but enough of my poison arrow tipped words hit their mark. It shook people up. It shamed them. It unified them as well. They found the thrill of community and unity in their complete hatred of me.

My shame at having my worst secrets revealed was a mirror.  I’d reflected their deepest fears, and worst impressions of themselves, and each other. What a terrible talent I possessed.

Not everything I’d written was cruel, however. I’d written nice things too. I clung to the hope of friendship, of forgiveness.

One day in early April I was sitting on my desk in my classroom. We were playing an afternoon game of “deskball” which involved sitting on top of your desk and throwing and catching a ball. One of those red rubber, playground balls that still give me palpitations. If you missed the ball, you were “out” and had to sit in your chair.

One of the more athletic boys on my Top10 list took the opportunity to whip the ball my way, aiming directly at my face. It stung and bounced off my cheek, towards the bookshelves. I moved from the desk to the chair, relieved to be out of the game. I was coiled tightly enough already without having to be ready to catch a ball lobbed at me like a missile.

WHACK. The ball hit the back of my head. The game had changed. SLAM. The ball hit me square in the face. No-one was playing deskball anymore. The new game was pummel Sharon in the face. SMACK. Now my nose was bleeding. Lump in throat. Cheeks burning. Eyes stinging.

My teacher, never a fan and now an enemy,  looked coldly at me. “So. What are you going to do, Sharon, baby?” she asked. “Cry?”

I stood up silently, truly forcing back tears and somehow I just walked out. I walked out of my elementary school, never to return.

Over the next few months I composed a thousand responses to that teacher and my classmates. I wrote these responses in my head. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake of writing things down, again.

Sharon baby. My name on her lips repulsed me. “ShhhhehRON”. What was that? Something bitter, toxic and foreign?  Oh how I hated her. Myself. My words. My name.

The following fall, for seventh grade, the three elementary schools in my town were combined into one middle school.  Everything was full of the promise of new; new cliques, new teachers, new corridors and desks. But still there were so many familiar faces. I returned with much trepidation and anxiety.

“Hey! Sharon! How was your summer?! I loooove your bag! Want to eat lunch together? Want to go to Friendly’s for ice cream after school?”

Classmates greeted me cheerily, as if nothing ever happened. I felt trapped in a Madeline L’Engle novel. IT had reprogrammed their minds. My name, coming from their mouths sounded entirely different again. Normal.  I wasn’t sure if that was nice, or terrible.

What lingered was odd. Somehow, written down an in print, my name still looked wrong to me. I could hear my teacher saying it like I was an awful bug to crush.

When I looked at my name in print, it pained me. When I closed my eyes and heard my classmates calling me to come sit with them, I could almost make myself forget. I could begin again. Like it never happened. Like a soldier after a war. A soldier with a hidden wound.

Sharon was the wound. S-h-a-r-o-n. It ached when it rained and whenever I wrote it down.

My hunt for a new name didn’t take long and doesn’t have a glamorous tale to go with. One day I saw the name “Ciaran” printed in an abandoned newspaper and (not knowing any better) rationalized that if the Cia was like the Cia in Marcia, it could still be pronounced like Sharon.  Different, but the same. I liked how it looked in print. It looked nothing like the bad pronunciation of Sharon that still echoed now and then.  It looked peaceful. I could only imagine someone saying it nicely, kindly.

I left the old lopped off spelling in the past, in the dirt of my early childhood, without ceremony. Ciaran is my scar. A pretty one I think. I’m not afraid to show it off.

Almost 30 years later there is no going back. I am not the walking wounded. I like people in general and even some of the same people who stole my diary, in particular. I don’t revisit this chapter often. I know who I am and I am who I am. I don’t intend to ever change my name back.

I do pay a price for having made Ciaran my name. Intentional or not, I hold people at arms length with it. I keep them at bay. It comes back to bite me when colleagues that I’ve known for years, who I think of as knowing me, introduce me as “Karen” or “Keeran”.  It’s their faux pas, but it’s totally my own fault.

Sometimes the safety of your armor is a burden you have to schlep.

All these years later, I still like the spelling of my confusing name. A little mysterious and complicated perhaps, but so much more “me” than the old spelling ever was. I’ll never be the open, vulnerable book that I was in sixth grade — that “Sharon”. But she’s still a part of me. We do have the same name. The spelling isn’t what’s important. You just have to know how to say it correctly.

If you ask me in public why I have this name, I’ll spare you the details. I’ll tell you I have eccentric parents. It’s true and a whole lot easier to explain.