What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
The moment I saw the prompt, my head began to explode.
I’m feeling all of my feelings right now, and it is not pleasant. But to understand where I am now, you have to understand that absolutely none of this has to do with my mom and dad. I love the name they gave me because it’s mine. Ann Davis’s mother says “Leslie Lanagan sounds like a movie star name.” I’ve smiled about that to myself for 20 years.
The problem is that I can’t say my middle name without my guts twisting up.
It should affect me as much as it does. It’s the tender place inside me that reminds me that I’m smart, strong, and brave to be able to handle everything I’m handling. It is redemption and recovery from a battle with a narcissist in which I lost, but I won the war.
And in fact, I think I’ll write about something else now. If you’re really that interested, I’m sure you can Google it. I don’t feel good about the direction this is going, and I need to give myself some grace. I can see the trails of thought setting themselves up in front of me, and none of them are positive.
But, I am entitled to my feelings, and they serve as a warning. My intuition is tuned. It’s why I haven’t changed it. That, and I tried changing my signature. It does not work…. changing any of it.
What’s done is done.
I’m not being dramatic. Maybe this story will come out another day, except it has. Just over and over. The emotional tendrils a narcissist puts in you are hard to get back out. You need a lot of meat tenderizer and a sharp razor.
My middle name is where the rubber meets the road, and if that’s all you ever know about it, you’ve gotten the important part.
And the fact is, everyone who’s met me from grade seven on knows why. I am sure I’ve even said it before on this blog, because I was a writer long before all of this happened.
My name didn’t change. I did.
It’s as dramatic a change as the time I spent with Meagan- first girlfriend, we were 17- my speech patterns changed from American to Canadian because I say grade seven now rather than seventh grade. It’s a great analogy for so many things, because there are so many Canadian-isms that I’ve adopted. That’s just one example of something second nature to me that didn’t come from my parents.
Having a tortured, nauseous feeling when I think about the fact that I have the middle name that I do? Not given to me by my parents, either.
And that’s its significance.
Stories That Are All True 