hello, my name is mara. nobody really calls me that though. most people call me june, which i don't really like, and never really have, but i suppose i chose it, so i only have myself to blame for this. i much prefer mara if it has to be between those two, although it really doesn't. you can also call me neko (根子), or bagel.
i think a lot about names. ever since i was born, and even still after i chose my first name two and a half years ago, i have been very unsatisfied with my name, and have sought to find some sort of resolution. most of this post is just me voicing my thoughts about names and identity, and might not be very interesting. that's ok, i just wanted to write it for myself. that's the fun part about having your own website!
the reasons i chose june all felt sort of constrained. there were names i liked more at the time, and knew that i would prefer, in some sense, but felt like i couldn't have. i like short names, and i wanted something naturalish sounding. taking a name of a month was attractive to me as a form of calendar and time worship, and it allowed me to claim a whole month, which is cool i suppose. at the time i liked that it was somewhat androgynous, because i did not believe in myself as a woman completely, and thought that having a more feminine name would be ill-fitting or perhaps even make me the victim of some joke. like, 'who did i think i was?' or something.
i really liked the names hazel and autumn at the time also, basically for nature worship reasons, but my friend told me autumn was a bad choice because all the autumns he had known were wack people, and hazel was my friend's daughter's name, and i didn't wanna step on any toes. maybe that was all in my head and nobody would have cared, but it seemed odd at the time. i still really like that name, but at this point it just feels like it doesn't fit. oh well. those two were also more feminine, which of course i actually wanted, but felt like i couldn't have.
this is a recurring theme. because of my set of philosophical values, i think that wanting things is much of the time a fool's errand. of course, it is also many times unavoidable. so i am frequently in the position of wanting things, but feeling like it is unnecessary or foolish to pursue them. or put more accurately, i don't like holding to the idea that only 'this one thing' can make me happy, or even that happiness can come as a transmission from outside objects. i believe very strongly in the infinite mutability of 'the self' - that we can change ourselves, our desires, and the meta-thoughts about those things, and that configurations of being that seem very set in stone are actually just illusions, walls in my head made of nothing more than mirrors and air.
this way of thinking is good for me a lot of the time. i have experienced a lot of turmoil in my life in the last x years, and i am able to have much of it slide off my back quite easily instead of being weighed down. i have trained myself to do difficult things, like getting up very early every day, or running very long distances, or dispensing with past addictions, without holding to previous ideas of comfort or necessity or preference.
other times, it hurts me quite a lot. with names, i feel like it can be stressful, because due to this mode of thinking, i don't really buy into any inherent importance of names. actually, i'm not sure such a thing as a 'name' (as opposed to a label) can really exist for myself (for anyone?). i often feel like the seed of the problem is here: i don't actually care about names, but people have to call me something, so it might as well be something i like.
and therein enter the elements of choice and preference. so i'll talk a little bit about what i like in names now. i like short names still, relatively old or natural sounding, and i like names that make it unambiguous that i am a woman. much of my problem with 'june' is that many people irl hear the name and assume i am some sort of androgyne hippy. which bothers me very much because i am not very good at correcting them.
i have found i like the letters m and h especially. i also value having a middle and last name that sychronize with your chosen name to form a pleasing text string. i also value ease of translation into japanese. this doesn't have to be literal. for example, when i briefly considered my name to be maple, i would write this as 楓 in japanese, even though this is spoken kaede (which means maple). but for example, mara can be written quite smoothly with kana as まら, whereas something like elizabeth has to make use of some hackiness (li -> リ, beth -> ベス).
i'll take a short aside here to talk about neko (根子). i really really like this name and it is the clearest example of what i like philosophically in a name for me. one, it is short and cute and easy to say. it is also homophone with the word for cat, which i think is a cute association. choosing the characters for this is quite fun for me: instead of using the character for cat (猫), i used ne as in 'root' 根 for the daoist and nature connotations, and ko 子 as it is a common ending to female japanese names, and is also the character that denotes master or sage in chinese - for example zhuangzi and laozi are written 莊子 and 老子.
i value having some uniqueness in my name. to this end i like neko and bagel a lot (so much so that i still consider these my names in some contexts), but even though i really enjoy them, people would probably think they are kind of ridiculous because they are not really culturally considered to be names. but i like that they would mostly be very associated with me. one of my other problems with june was that there are many people named june, which didn't really bother me until people started commenting how many junes they knew to me, which made me feel kinda weird. if i am going to the trouble of picking an identifier, i would rather have it be as unambiguous as possible.
this last point is perhaps the biggest roadblock. most names are 'taken', either by people i know in real life or by people that are in my online circles. for example, my girlfriend's name is meri (merilynn). previously, when my name was june meridian harmony, i often wanted to use meridian as my name to escape being june. however, then we would be meri and meri and that doesn't really work. or, for example, i also really like the name hannah (or hana), but there is someone in our friend group irl that is named that, and so i must leave it be. the same with katherine, or iris, or erika, or sarah, or many other names that i like a lot and had at one point considered for myself. i don't want to step on anyone's toes, or seem like i am stealing my name from anyone.
mara actually also violates this notion. although a little more distantly from me personally, i still normally would not have used it due to this principle. in fact, when i first proposed it to meri, she advised me not to use it. i only doubled back after a friend independently returned with this after i asked her to name me. i thought that now that i had another source besides myself, it would probably be ok. also, it works as a shortened version of my original middle name, meredith, which i have always adored, but is slightly too long and clunky for daily usage.
so for now, i will be mara. i really like mara for philosophical reasons too - mara is a demon in buddhist cosmology representing factors nonconducive to enlightenment. having my name be mara is a reminder that name and form, and clinging to them, is not a good direction for myself, and will hopefully remind me not to get too lost in name-world again. of course, one day i might switch off mara, since i believe that names, like everything, are fluid and can be easily changed, but whatever that's a problem for another time.
i still would like to finish this name. since meredith is no longer my middle name, i need to find a new one, and since my last name "harmony" sounds odd with "mara", i need to find a new last name too. provisionally i have been using mara esper welsley, but this is up for modification. esper i have always liked, and welsley is the last name of the person who named me - i adopted it as a thank you to them.
mara 12.11.2023