What's in a Name?

I have a weird name. It was weird by the standards of Sonoma County, where I grew up, and it’s weird by the considerably less conservative standards of Berkeley, where I live now. My name doesn’t match the assumptions people make about me based on my appearance, and nearly every time I need to tell someone my name, some version of this little skit plays out:

Them: What’s your name?

Me: Orion.

What follows that exchange is the rest of the essay — an account of carrying an uncommon name through ordinary American life, the origin story I grew up believing about how I got it, and what I learned, late, about who actually named me. It opens out from there: into a small constellation of other Orions I’ve found along the way, and into the larger question of what we owe a story about ourselves once it turns out the story isn’t quite true.

Read the full essay at East Bay Magazine →

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Note on the collection

This is the earliest piece in the Field Notes sequence — the one that taught me what the collection was even going to be about. The pieces I’ve written since keep arriving at the same problem from different directions: the gap between the story you’ve told about a thing and what the thing actually was.

The full essay is at East Bay Magazine.