That's not my name...

Gone, but not forgotten.

My birth name was not Renée. Well it was and it wasn’t. Renée was my middle name. My birth name was different. I never connected with it. It never felt right. I associate my birth name with what Australians affectionately call ‘bogans’. I guess if I were to use the American version of this, think of Joy from ‘My Name is Earl’. Pretty rough around the edges but with a fundamentally sound moral compass. My birth name could never be said in a normal tone, no… it begged for the speaker to apply a nasal timbre. It conjures images of trailer parks, fold out chairs, VB stubbies and ‘wife beater’ singlets. It’s a name given to the quintessential “Aussie battler” if you will. The kind of person you’d expect to see on A Current Affair, ineloquently swearing about how the banks had fucked her over while she’s ‘doing it tough’.

The connotations which I attached to my birth name were widely applied. People with my birth name are rarely portrayed as sophisticated, articulate or intelligent. They’re usually prostitutes, low-lifes or deadbeats. Even as a child, I was conscious of it’s generally accepted implications. I asked my mother, “Why did you choose that name?” and she insisted that she did so because she thought it was pretty. In her defence, it was the late 70s and perhaps there might have been a certain supermodel that shared my birth name… but she certainly had a fairly big advantage in overcoming its nuance.

Irrespective of my displeasure, I continued to live my life with that name, enduring all the usual playful taunts from friends and foes. I kept my birth name until my mid 20s, at which point I decided that I wanted to ‘leave her behind’ and start anew. I didn’t want to dishonour my parents by rejecting the name they gave me so I switched the names around and buried my birth name. It was completely serendipitous that my former middle name quite literally means 'reborn’ in latin or french, whichever you want to adopt - and so I became Renée.

At first people were reluctant to accept the change. My mother firmly believed that, like many ADHD flights of fancy that came before, I would change my mind and revert to my birth name. But as time went on, even she realised I wasn’t going to do that. Putting aside the administrative nightmare of changing my name on absolutely everything, I was never going back to being called that name.

At this point, you may be asking why did I want to leave her behind?

Well, she had been through some shit. I won’t go into it except to say that she was a victim of crime, … more than once and sufficient that the state has awarded her as many hours of free therapy as she needs. Back in 2003, she (in her delusion) felt she had processed all of what happened to her and she wanted to leave that part of her behind.

I only recently became aware of the term ‘deadname’. I didn’t know it existed and I didn’t know that I essentially had a deadname. There are only a handful of people outside of my own family who know my birth name - and disclosing it to them was an action born from a relationship of trust and mutual respect. Whenever I felt safe enough to tell people, I would preface it with “it’s not a joke to call me by this name. I have zero sense of humour when it comes to this”. Even my own parents exclusively call me Renée and that other girl has been buried.

Buried…

I once agreed with Hannah Gatsby’s sentiment in ‘Nannette’ that I didn’t want to bury my past. I didn’t want to dishonour her experience, but here I am doing exactly that… and why? Because deep down, I still blame her for everything that happened. It was her fault for being innocent. It was her fault for trusting the wrong people, for drinking too much and for putting herself in dangerous situations. She did the wrong thing. She acted the wrong way and she deserved what she got.

So this is me calling myself on my own bullshit.

This is me trying to overcome the deep-seated shame I feel over events that were completely outside of her control… out of my control. It wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault so why should I hide her away? She represents some of the hardest lessons I learned. She went from being full of joie de vivre, to having the spark of innocence extinguished and living in the shadow of (what she perceived as) her own mistakes. It’s one thing to say I am a different person and I don’t feel like her, but I never felt like her. That name never fitted me. It never felt right, but she is still a part of me.

So I think I am going to unearth her. Not to bring her back into regular use - fuck no. I still have absolutely no sense of humour when it comes to this. She and I have a complicated relationship and I’m happy for her to stay largely silent. At the same time, however, I need to set her free and take away some of the power concealing her is giving to the reasons for hiding her away in the first place. I cannot continue to deny her existence. My name is Renée but Renée could not exist without Cheryl.