https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Rose_Papa_Meilland.jpg

Thirty-four years ago, on Rosh Hashanah, I stood on the banks of the Connecticut River and ceremoniously, with the help of my chavurah, changed my name to Dina, a name I have now had for nearly half my life.

I’d been playing with the name change for about a year. My birth name, Deborah, never felt like it fit me. In fact, the only people who ever called me Deborah were my mother when she was angry at me, and a third grade teacher I didn’t like. Debbie, the diminutive I did identify with, was beginning to feel more and more childish, but shortening it to the more adult, “Deb” always felt like something was cut off, or like the name of a sports jock, not a poet.

Another reason I made the switch: there were so many Debbies in my life, I felt boxed in by the herd. Two of my close friends growing up were also named Debbie. And I can’t even count the number of times, I’d call a schoolmate. This is Debbie, I would say. And they would say, Which one? Which made me feel so anonymous and inconsequential. To make things even worse, there was an up and coming folksinger named Debbie Friedman, and a few people thought it was me. I didn’t know you sang, they said. Since one of my secret ambitions had always been to be a folksinger, I was miffed that this other Debbie Friedman had made the cut when I hadn’t.

So it was definitely time to break out of the box and become my own person.

I chose Dina because I wanted to stick with a D-name that sounded Jewish and was easy to pronounce. I also wanted it to be different, but not too different–just a little off the beaten track. While transitioning into the change I wrote my name as Debbie Dina Friedman, which I then changed to D. Dina Friedman on the official state documents a few months after that Rosh Hashanah ritual, paying the 60 bucks and being officially done with my birth name.

If I could do it again, I’d dump the initial D in front. I still like it, but it creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic hassles, similar to those my partner and I saddled our kids with when we gave them a double unhyphenated last name. But other than that, I’ve been very happy with the name change, which helped me open to seeing myself in a new way. And I was grateful to the many family members and friends who gracefully transitioned to calling me by the name I wished to call myself.

My parents, however, were hurt by my rejection of the name they chose for me, and continued to call me by my birth name. Being a parent myself, I understood their unhappiness, but ultimately, this should be just one more step in parenting’s continuous process of letting go. My father, to his credit, would call me Dina when my mother wasn’t listening, but I could tell he struggled to do it. My mother, to her credit, addresses envelopes to Dina (or usually just D.–I guess that was the reason I kept the D. before Dina) but still continues to call me by my birth name.

As my family sat around the table this Rosh Hashanah, our conversation suddenly turned to road apps–how to find a decent one that did not succumb to the arbitrary renaming of Lake Ontario. While I do believe, as Shakespeare said, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and that we have the absolute right to change our own names, we do not have the right to unilaterally change the names of things around us, especially when there are others involved with equal stakes in the outcome.

Fantasizing is fun when you’re three or four. My grandson erupts into laughter if all of a sudden he’s Grandma and I’m Manu, or if both of our names are Poop and his preschool teacher is Miss Poopy. But at some point, we need to grow up and face the fact that renaming a body of water, or plastering your own name on an arts center dedicated as a memorial to a much better person than you does not change the hard reality of who you are. Even when I became Dina, I didn’t magically morph into the wiser, cooler me I might have wished to become. (And I didn’t become a folksinger, either.) I was still me with all my quirks and flaws, though perhaps with a little less self-limiting baggage, and a clearer vision of who I could be if I worked for it. But that’s the operating word: working for it.

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True confessions: I subscribe to far more Substacks, blogs, writing sites, daily poems, daily prompts, magazines, news reports, activist mailing lists, and social media groups, than I can possibly keep up with.

So my day begins with a delicate dance of choosing what to read and what to ignore. Actually, I’ve revised my habits so my day begins with a brief meditation followed by 30 minutes of exercise before I even look at the onslaught of text in my email box, but once I’ve opened the lid on my laptop, the rush is on. So many little tentacles of info competing for my attention, and all of them are just a small slice of the wider pie of projects and activities I’ve committed to, not to mention the obligations of maintaining my home, nurturing my family, and being a good friend to the many people who matter to me.

Somehow, I don’t think this issue is uniquely my problem. Likely, many of us are swamped by the competition between our life’s obligations and our desires for how we might want to spend our time. Being rained on by torrents of electronic words only adds to the flood.

So, I get it when I write a blog post and there are absolutely no reactions. But it’s still an eerie feeling–like shouting into the void.

Artist: Sam White; retrieved from newgrounds.com

Does *anybody* hear me? Does *anyone* think what I’m writing is worth listening to? 

Absolutely not, says my inner critic, whom I’ve decided to name Eloise. No one cares about your stupid weekly dribbles.

Should I stop blogging? It could be a relief to take one more thing off my to-do list! 

My initial reason for starting a blog was to do what all authors are told they need to do. The goal–stated by every marketing workshop I attended and every resource I read was to build a platform by acquiring a large degree of subscribers. That never happened, and as I’m not generally someone who plays the long-term patience game, I could have quit after the first year, when my most recent books were considered old news anyway. But the surprising thing was that I found I really liked blogging. Taking the time to think about some tidbit from my life or the wider world and its relationship to the themes I’m passionate about–creative expression and social change–has been invigorating. And trying to encapsulate that thought into a short 500-800 word post has been a formidable and stimulating writing challenge.

Besides, Substack continues to seduce me with a challenge of how many weeks in a row I can post a blog. And this is something I can control, even if I can’t control the number of people in my subscriber base.

What’s also satisfying is the feeling that I’m not just spouting words on paper to an amorphous audience. I’m writing to a bunch of friends, as most of my subscribers are people I know. (And I’d love to meet the rest of you!) Because of that, I’m determined to stay authentically myself and not hide behind some ostensibly wiser but more distant “author mask.” And it tickles me thinking that if you’re able to take some of your very precious time to read some of these musings, it might lead to more connection between us. If you react, or comment, or let me know in some way, then I can feel more connected, too.

Which is why the posts with no reactions at all leave me a bit lonely and off-kilter. But seriously, no shade! I wish I could read every Substack post from every single friend I subscribe to, and I can’t. Though I do try to prioritize reading posts written by friends so that I can get to at least some of them some of the time. And I’m going to make it a point to react more, because I often read and don’t react–out of busyness, or laziness, and now I’m realizing how great it would be if if the void I’m shouting into could echo back. Yes! I hear you!

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