No Name

I don’t feel connected to my name.  I don’t feel connected to any name, at this point.  I feel like I have no name and I’m floating around the wilderness with no use for one - another reason I feel safe and at home out here.  My whole life my name has been stored in a file instead of moving, living, and growing with me.  When I talk to myself...it goes something like this, “Linn...I mean Hei Jung...or whatever your fucking name is...”.  When a stranger asks my name, I pause for the amount of time someone takes before they tell a lie.  It feels wrong.  And I feel people avoiding using any name at all when they talk to me.  I now know what it’s like to have a name that’s not English in America.  It’s hard.  Just like any other part of you, you don’t really know the full importance of a body part or organ system until it stops working.  And I feel like both these names have been wrecked in a head on collision.  I was Hei Jung first.  But had it stolen from me...hidden and butchered...then placed in a world that doesn’t understand it.  I grew up pronouncing it completely wrong while being force fed a different name that was poisoning me at my roots.  I loathe the name Linn.  It slices my heart like a paper cut every time I hear it...or say it now.  And it’s been over a month, and I don’t feel like a Heijung at all, either.  It’s a language I don’t speak...it makes no sense to me.  How could I feel connected to a language I don’t understand the sound of or don’t even know how to read and write the characters?  I’m trying, but I don’t.  It feels hollow.  Calling myself Heijung feels like trying to put reins on the wind.  And I’m supposed to attach to it?  I don’t have a name.  Right now, I don’t even want one.

I don’t even care what people call me now, because I was born unattached to everyone and everything.  First I was severed from my mother, and then I was severed from my name.  A mother is like a vital body part when you’re a newborn...you are helpless without her intuition to read your needs, her voice to speak up for you, and her arms to comfort you...it’s the foundation to which you build your house, your ability to connect, and your brain to function.  I guess that’s why I don’t have a house, run from relationships like they’re trying to kill me, and obsessively study the brain in order to hold myself together.  And a name is one of those things like learning how to play an instrument when you’re young.  Picking up the guitar at 37 and expecting it to sound good might never happen.  And I can’t name myself.  A name finds you.  Like fate.  And then it’s something you grow into and make.  Perhaps I just have to build the name Heijung from scratch...now at 37.  It feels like an arranged marriage to a complete stranger, though.  I guess it’s just going to take time.  Until then, I’m going to avoid being in situations that require a name and be free of anything requiring an identity...and just be me.