Beyond Selidor

I'm glad you weren't aiming your comments at me, as I took it to imply that you thought I was just a complete fantasist for studying what I study, and I'm a bit fragile and touchy about having to constantly defend my educational choices.

In terms of naming - your discomfort with it is exactly what I was trying to get at. There's such a correlation between naming and asserting ownership or identity, and the examples I was giving were intended to be negative. Naming as exclusion, if you will. I realise that's not entirely what you're talking about (you seem to be objecting to identities imposed on you by others? in which case I'm right with you), but I see quite clear parallels.

I don't really have your discomfort with names as a form of identity, although I remember noticing that I am much happier identifying myself with my job now that it's something I enjoy. When I was working in jobs I hated, I always said 'I work as a sub-editor', 'I work in a school' or whatever. But as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with carving out my own identity, and giving it names. Even my name, Ronni, was something I consciously chose as part of a more comprehensive claiming of a new identity (I cut my hair, I got my ears pierced, I made a choice to enter high school and make new friends, rather than sit with people I knew from primary school, and I decided that from then on I would be addressed as 'Ronni' and not my full name). My online username has a long, drawn-out backstory complete with allusions to literature, the person I felt like in high school and various other things. Whenever I had the choice to write on a topic of my choice in high school or uni, I wrote about names, identity, exile or dispossession: my extended essay for the IB was about names and identity in folklore and fantasy, I wrote an essay on names in slave narratives in an American literature course in undergrad, my Honours thesis was about exile and Irish identity in medieval Irish literature, my MPhil was about exile and the twelfth-century renaissance in medieval Irish literature, and my PhD is about dispossession, authority, identity and how that is expressed in people's interaction with the land and with history. So yeah. It's something that I find constantly fascinating, and that I think about a lot.