The Via Dolorosa

When I was 12, in 1997, our English class studied Harp In The South, Ruth Park's classic story of a poor family living in the slums of Surry Hills in Sydney. (This is hilarious on multiple levels, because Surry Hills is now one of the most expensive, posh parts of the city. What a different fifty years makes.) I loved the book, but the important point is that it had a character in it called Dolour Darcy. I'd never heard of the word 'Dolour' before, and I looked it up, loved its meaning, and promptly adopted it for myself as a kind of pen-name in my paper diaries. You have to remember that I was a very emo teenager, and a word that meant 'sorrow' appealed to me. At some point, I started sticking 'Inviolate' at the end (because unbreakable sorrow was clearly better than just sorrow), and at least one of my email addresses still has that as the name of the account. I joined a couple of online forums around 1999 with the username 'Dolour', but I drifted away.

By 2001, the word 'dolour' itself had lost some of its appeal. I didn't like how it sounded the same as 'dollar'. But then I realised that the Latin form of the word, Dolorosa, was even more beautiful and appropriate. It sounded lovely, it meant the same thing, and it had even more histrionic allusions contained within it. I joined the Republic of Heaven with the username 'Aletheia Dolorosa' (the 'Aletheia' is an allusion to the alethiometer in His Dark Materials) in 2003. I joined Livejournal as dolorosa_12 the same year. As I spent more time online, the number of Dolorosae increased. 'dolorosa' on Obernet. @ronnidolorosa on Twitter. RonniDolorosa on IRC. And so on.

The point I want to make is that I've been using some form of the name 'Dolorosa' since the mid-90s, and using it online for over ten years. Where I could, such as on Tumblr and Ao3 and forums, I used the name in its pure form. When another Dolorosa had got there first, I modified it with numbers or my first name. And this didn't bother me very much. The issue is, the word, in whatever form it takes, has become something of an identity.

I know people online who shed names like skins, slipping between identities when the old one stops having any meaning. But I have never wanted to be anything other than Dolorosa. If I could be bothered, I sometimes think I would make it a middle name, although in actual fact I associate it only with online life. But even though almost everyone online calls me by my real name, Ronni, and I certainly don't hide it, I feel so strongly Dolorosa, and love my online moniker so much. I couldn't contemplate changing it.

Dolorosa, most specifically, designates the part of me that is articulate, whose words are listened to and understood. I struggle so much in real life to give my words meaning and purpose and clarity, and I fail dismally a lot of the time, and I fear above all things not being listened to, not being understood or not being believed, that it matters so much to me that here is one place, one identity, where that's never a problem. For whatever reason, I express myself best in written (and, most specifically, blogging) format - in words attached to the name Dolorosa.

All this is by way of preamble to an encounter I had this morning. I woke up to find a message in my Tumblr inbox from another user, who said they'd 'been monitoring your Tumblr for three months', and asked if I would exchange URLs as I'd not posted. I politely told the user an abbreviated and less emotional version of what I've just said to all of you, and that seems to have been the end of it - but this isn't the first time that I've been contacted with this particular request.

I can understand the user's frustration, especially since I suspect they want Dolorosa for its Homestruck allusions (am I correct in assuming there's something in Homestruck called 'the Dolorosa'?) and I don't appear to have chosen my username for any particular purpose, but as you can see, I am someone who puts a great deal of weight on names, identity and the intersection thereof. Whenever I encounter a name online, I assume it's been chosen with as much thought, emotion and deliberation as mine (which makes usernames like 'ilovetoast' even more hilarious). I wouldn't dream of asking a random stranger to change their username because they don't seem to be doing much with it - that name is the identity they have chosen for themselves. And, as has happened many times to me, if someone has got to my preferred username first, I have just shrugged my shoulders and modified it with underscores, numbers or additional words. That's the internet I grew up with. It seems so entitled to behave otherwise.

On a lighter, but related note, one of my friends at Cambridge has become known as 'Eugene, Lord of the Stallions'. Eugene is the anglicised version of his (Irish) name, and Lord of the Stallions is a somewhat inaccurate translation of his surname.