My name change was a cope

Remember that one time I got everyone to call me by the name of a planet?

For years, as I watched the growing frequency of name changes, I told myself I would never change my name. I thought changing your name was a red flag, a public admission that you have major baggage. As I watched people close to me change their names, I worried about them. I expressed judgmental concern in private—“You can’t just run from yourself like that! Changing your name doesn’t change your life.”

I found it cringeworthy and narcissistic—why should a name matter that much? Stop dwelling over identity and just live your life. It doesn’t matter.

Then, last year, I changed my name. Of course, it wasn’t cringe at all once I did it! I was working at a coffee shop run by queer kids, and we were all changing our names and pronouns as casually as we were getting our septums pierced. We were creating new realities together, fashioning ourselves into whoever we wanted to be—our own little world felt like magic.

So, I asked my best friend to name me—and because I hadn’t met the quota of queer stereotypes yet, she chose the fierce warrior planet dominating my astrology chart. Now, I was Mars. I was no longer vulnerable little Kelsey who grew up in hell, getting raped by the man who named her Kelsey. I was no longer the far too easily googleable “Kelsey Zazanis”, two clicks yielding every detail of my disturbing life history. I was Mars now—floating through space and time, weightless, playing around with the fluid abstractions of identity. Mars would be stronger, freer, unfazed by Kelsey’s pain and grief.

Immediately after changing my name, I moved into an intentional community where I lived in a house with 18 other people. What a perfect start to a new life, nesting myself and my new identity into this new community, meeting an exhausting number of new faces every day—the perfect opportunity to practice saying “Hi, I’m Mars” over and over again until it no longer felt foreign. Overnight, I stopped hearing the name Kelsey almost entirely. These people had never known of Kelsey, so they called me Mars with conviction, like they really believed it. And a year of hearing that made me really believe it, too.

Kind of. But I couldn’t bear to ask my closest friends to make the switch. It felt wrong. I couldn’t fool them—they know me at my core. They say “Kelsey” with such love—why would I ever want that to change? So, I lived my life as Mars, savoring the occasional “Kelsey” here and there on phone calls with old friends—like our little secret, or my guilty pleasure, or perhaps the golden thread I knew would keep me tethered to my inner child. Kelsey never wanted to die. She just wanted protection from pain—she had hit max capacity. It was as if the name change served as a way to temporarily shield and protect my inner child who couldn’t bear the weight of her own grief. She needed to compartmentalize it, tuck it away, take a little vacation away from it all. 

None of this felt conscious to me—I framed the name change as a playful social experiment—but my inner child knew what she was doing. During my year of Mars, I delved into “inner child healing work” and danced around the irony of it all, trying to connect to little Kelsey without ever using her name. As time went on, it felt stranger. I fell in love with one of my housemates, and he asked me if it felt foreign to be called “Mars” in our most intimate exchanges—and it did. “I love you, Mars” didn’t resonate through my body. I asked the next person I dated to sprinkle in “Kelsey” here and there; hearing it felt as potent as a warm hug after months of touch deprivation.

Yet still, I stuck with the name change, not wanting to revisit my past, not wanting to fuss over matters of identity, and not wanting to complicate things socially. I leaned into feelings of ambivalence and reached a point where I claimed not to care what I was called. Any name, any pronouns—fuck it. Identity is narcissistic. Who am I? Who cares? I don’t care.

My inner child did care, though, despite whatever intellectual spin I put on it. 

I hit a turning point one night when I took MDMA with someone I was dating. As the MDMA hit me, I started cracking up about how Mars is a fake name. I couldn’t stop laughing. I found it hilarious. MDMA brings out your inner child, I think, and little Kelsey was cracking up over the silliness of this Mars era, as if I had successfully played a practical joke on everyone around me by convincing them to refer to me as a planet. 

“Mars is a planet, silly! You’re Kelsey!” Suddenly it all felt so playful. That was jarring—I had taken it so seriously! My inner child was never fooled; she was waiting for me to get in on the joke this whole time.

So, uh… joke’s over, y’all! My real name is Kelsey. Gotcha!

I don’t take it entirely lightly, though. For Christ’s sake, I was named Kelsey by my rapist. Changing my name, at one point or another, was inevitable. It was a crucial part of my individuation process. I would find it concerning if I never questioned my relationship to the name—names are intimate, and it’s objectively sad if your name, that special sound expressing the essence of “you”, was chosen by a serial child rapist. I needed to un-choose the name so that this time around, I was the one choosing it for myself.

I never wanted to change my name. I wanted to change the utter lack of control I had over my past. I wanted to change everything Kelsey had been through. I wanted to change my life. Flash back to those judgmental musings of mine—“You can’t just run from yourself like that! Changing your name doesn’t change your life.” 

Changing my name did change my life, though. Not in a cheap, quick-fix, overnight transformation sort of way. Changing my name changed my life by letting me escape myself for precisely the time needed until I was ready to meet myself again.