Caroline, Caroline.... wherefore art thou Caroline? That's a question one would have to ask the people who stamped that name on my forehead at birth, the parents. I used to think I'd been stuck with the name Caroline and that everyone was stuck with a name they never asked for and probably wouldn't have chosen if it was up to them. When I was 10 I was absolutely certain my name should have been Lola and I would stop at nothing to be Lola, that obviously didn't stick. Then 12 year old Caroline read a book about a pig and a spider and was convinced her name should've been Charlotte. I tried many a scheme to rid myself of the eight letter plague that was my name. One thing that took me a long time to discover was that I had grown around my name, it had been weaved so deeply into me that I was inseparable from it. Every time I'd tried to cast off my name, I was trying to cast off who I was. Each time I expressed my disdain for it, I was insulting myself. It came to a point where I had to ask myself what was wrong with my name. I had no idea why I disliked my first name so much. As I was hanging upside down off of the edge of my bed, the position in which I process thought the clearest, I realized I didn't like my name because I'd always been told that it didn't suit me. I'd been told that it was too soft of a name to go with my personality, back when I argued everything just for the sake of arguing because that's what I thought confident girls did. I'd been told that it was "too white." (insert eye roll here). I had been told by all kinds of people, the type of person I had to be because of my name. The fact that I've always had my own opinions about things, no matter how ridiculous said opinions may be, has always been one of my favorite things about myself. I decided in that second, that other people's opinion of what I should be would never effect my self respect ever again. The truth is your name is like a dress, one dress can look like 250 different dresses on 250 different people it all depends on how they wear it. Coco Chanel once said, "Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress." There's a woman in this dress, and her name is Caroline.
1 Comment
Don Goble
1/16/2019 10:17:30 am
Caroline,
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AuthorCaroline M. Washington is a student who blogs about films. Archives
May 2019
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