first blush
nevermind the confusion i've found myself in the throws of with what i want to do with all this—i think some of the most valuable art that i've encountered has come my way over the course of the past few months that this and my home website has been under its current design & function more broadly.
which i'm incredibly grateful for; i think to a good extent i've been flawed in my approach(es) to how i want to show off, share, curate, and the like, but the fact that i'm doing it at all is the part that's valuable to me. you'd think i'd understand that more closely with all i've posted about since january, but...
the one that maybe sticks out the most (outside of the bombshell that was 'real house' by adrianne lenker in my best songs list) is the three-minute-and-change MallBat video 'How to Give Yourself a Name'. it feels like a purposeful black sheep, an artistically interesting, imperfect, incredibly brief ode to a changing self. and it's probably been the hardest to internalize out of that bunch that i've decided to grant that status.
even with how wonderfully freeing of a concept it is, with her personal angle & its relatively broad resonance, no name feels 100% right for me. it tries to lay out this quaint, storybook approach to becoming you, which is why i think it's such a brilliant video in such a small package—and maybe the pathway that she suggests is really the point, of adding, and changing, and morphing, and being you for you's sake... but that inconsistency is both freeing and claustrophobic, personally.
i want a set name, one that i can rely on. not even a full, well thought out one, with care & attention given to it, because that's what i want for myself, not for my name.
just a set of letters that feels like the bricks of the walls around me, that feels like the perfectly crafted windowsill to rest my arms on, the wind that grazes past the aching barriers i've put up.
nat is what i've used online both for the lack of better ideas, and the fact that it reduces my given name to only the letters i still find relevant. the rest is unnerving, uncomfortable, untrue.
so maybe the parentheses that house the rest of my name will unbuckle eventually, unclasp themselves once i find the keys that unlock however many doors i need to step through to get to that point. i just wonder how many people will be there at the end, once i find solace, once i walk through that last one. how many of who i have in my life now, no matter how loosely, will want to endure that new(er) person.
it'll be interesting to find out.
<3