CNF Online Journal 1: “My Name.”
The name I’ve lived with seemed to live a life of its own. Sometimes, it lived as Gaea, the goddess of the all things Earth, mother of us all. Other times, it lived among the plants and nature as the very concept of the magnificence of nature. My own parents named me this because “you meant the world to us.” It kept running off to be these amazing things, leaving me to keep trying to live up to this stupid word’s grandeur. It left me feeling disappointed that I could barely keep a cactus alive, that I could barely nurture myself, much less anyone else. It left me whispering my own name because I feared its power. I was okay never correcting people at Starbuck’s or at the reception because I could then have the perfect disguise to escape “Gaia’s” wrath unto my pathetic self. I was Kia, Gia, Leia, Jeya, being anyone else was better than wearing around the name of the Earth itself only for people to be met with barely any pebble of greatness.
Despite this, my name has remained the same despite how many times it was changed.
Every test I took had me write down ‘Gaia’ before anything, each paper had been unmistakably written by Gaia Mauricio. I used to hate having to read or write my own name because it felt so false. I didn’t feel like it was my own. Yet, there it always was stamped onto each achievement and failure, irrefutably mine.
I didn’t know many kids who shared my name. In a sense, it truly was my own burden to bear, for no one else really knew what it was to be “Gaia.” Only me and the Goddess looking down upon it. It didn’t help that I was the probably the only one that had my name pronounced “geh-ya.” Apparently it was supposed to be pronounced “ga-ya,” but someone in my family pronounced it weird, and the rest is history. A mistake to define a longer strong of people getting it slightly off.
It’s only lately that I came to accept my name as my own. It’s true no one else has to deal with having it. It’s true that something much greater embodies “Gaia,” and people will continue to remark about it whenever they meet me. People will still mispronounce my mispronunciation of a name. I won’t change it. I don’t really want to erase the memories I’ve had that came about because of this. They’re the only things that make this name irrefutably mine.
