Oh, Shakespeare, you crazy person-type thing, you. You really did know how to turn a phrase. The thing is, names have become a bit...odd these days. They still denote family ties and provide links to your origins and so forth, but in an age where we sign up to many networking sites, where we interact via social media so often, the act of naming is now both more meaningful and almost without meaning.
Some of us choose our own names in life, but for most people (of my acquaintance, at least) our names are chosen by our esteemed parents. And don't they have some crazy ideas? Mine have never even hinted that they considered sensible names like 'Talon' or 'Book Pixie', either of which I would have embraced.
Mostly, our names tell us more about our parents and their views than they do about ourselves, yet despite this I spent a lot of time as a kid reading up on the deeper meanings of my name, as though that meant anything on a cosmic scale. I did the same thing with my star-sign, of course, and delighted in both those elements which matched me and the places where I deviated from the apparent Sagittarius norm. Being equally happy with either option rather suggests it more about the chance to think about who I was as a person which delighted me, and was not an indication that I was really learning how to be me from a book with a muted blue cover covered in badly drawn symbols. Trying to wrestle a sense of myself from all these little bits of pieces of other people's decisions was tiring work, and I can only imagine how the internet would have impacted on that.
Thank goodness that I did not have to think up usernames until I had reached a mature and sensible age and could choose names which reflected an intelligent, thoughtful and thoroughly grounded persona.
Which is why I have just changed a bunch of my on-line usernames to Fireapple.
One of the things about the names we come up with for social media and the like is that these names can be transient. We can try them on and shrug them off, skipping merrily back to the clothing-rail of names in our heads to try on another one. Yet I don't. Not really. Generally speaking, once I have chosen a name and a profile picture, that is it. Job done. That is now my name. Granted, I have different names on different sites, but they tend to revolve around a few options.
I like to imagine that other people make carefree choices about their usernames, happily opting for whimsical monikers and not worrying overmuch about what they have chosen, but perhaps they spend hours determining just the right mix of words to sum up their entire personality and position in the world. What do I know?
If any of you feel like walking me through your self-naming process, feel free to chip in.
Tonight, I have gone with two random things I quite like, and shoved them together. Given how much I love apples, both as food and symbols, and my obsession with fire, this time almost entirely symbolically, I am quite pleased with my new name.
It also ties in rather nicely in some ways with my story in the upcoming RASSSA anthology, though perhaps I should have gone with Snowapple for that one.
Here's a link to our RASSSA website. Here be dragons. Sort of. Something dragon-adjacent, in any case.
You know, being Fireapple is making me feel much freer. I think I'll see how this name fits, for a while.
