Welcome back, Katherine?

"Your blood is Arab." No, it's AB+, actually.

What is your name?

I hesitate, because who is living within me at this second?

The irony is almost hilarious. A Stack called Antisuppressant, yet I supress what might be the most central part of my identity, out of fear. It would be usual for anyone else, I suppose. Not sharing the small town they grew up in, the high school that shaped their worldview, pictures of the friend that moved from London to Bath when they were seven.

Except, I think the most private detail about me is not a place or a face, but a name. My first name. My first name.

The one which, when introduced to say a speech, I made a joke out of. The one which I changed when I was 11, though never legally. The one that my mother, my beautiful mother with a heart of gold, never chose for me.

I have a thousand names, and all of them hold a little piece of me.

I am Katherine. The name with which my non-Catholic parents chose to baptise me into the Church into. The name I secretly wish those outside of space and time see me for. But she is more than that. My namesake, I mean. She is one of many, but dare I say, my favourite. An early Christian scholar, she had a wit and a tongue and sharp, beautiful eyes. In front of men nobody dared to challenge, the kind that were immortalised through stock image quotes, she praised and preached. Her words brought many to God’s throne, and I see myself within her. I see my words, blazing with fire yet unrefined, locked in the purgatory made from my mistakes. Transcending time periods and languages and upbringings, is this thread I share with her.

Yet, I am also Selena. Selena hailed from a mother who had no dolls growing up. She has porcelain skin (tinted sunscreen) and lips with barely any gloss on them, and shiny dark hair that glistens in winter sunlight. Selena carries no namesake with her, but she is pretty. Not functional, not in the slightest, of course. But she is a fairy-tale, a delusion that is outwardly perfect but inwardly hollow. Nobody ever built on this version of Selena. She only existed in my mother’s innocent mind, before life had its way with her and she was forced to concede her image of a beautiful doll-like daughter. It started when I had developmental problems as a child, and finally finished when I began wearing makeup and begging her to let me dye my hair. Selena is dead, long-gone, but similar to a jar of ashes on the Taboo Shelf, I look to her every so often, and compare my mirror reflection to who she would’ve been if she grew up.

Yet, I am also my birth name. It’s letters and syllables are unimportant. But it is not the name I can truly breathe in. It hails from a Mesopotamian goddess, one who was selfish and prideful and egotistic but got her legacy anyway. My father’s friend suggested it at a late night gathering, misspelt. It was the most cultural name that my dad had heard yet, and so, he dragged it home like a wet dog already half-infected with rabies. It was slapped on my curly black baby hair, biting Selena off of her golden halo in the process. It was the bad odour that followed me around in primary school, the name the substitute teachers stumbled upon in secondary school. It was supposed to represent my culture, my heritage. Yet it just symbolised the growing divide between my Syrian background and my second-generation-immigrant self. My parents tried, I’ll give them that. They taught me the significance of my name, and how the word flowed off the tongue in their first language. But, more than I am Syrian, I am English.

My mum hates that word, English. She thinks it represents all the evils of the west. She insists I call myself British, so the common passer-by won’t ignore my dark curly hair and big brown eyes and the Arabic accent that comes out when I speak German. Yet it is what I identify with, more deeply than the country that is now ripped to shreds. So when strangers ask for my name, I tell them that I am called Ana.

Ana is a shortening of my name. It is Westernised. And as much as those like me fight to keep themselves from being given to their new homes, I welcome it. Life in the West is quieter, easier, more peaceful. Being Ana is so much sweeter than being the complicated, messy fusion of culture and dreams and feigned perfection. It is a temptation that society says I shouldn’t give into, but it is one hard to resist.

Because I am not as graceful and saintly as Katherine, not as beautiful and perfect as Selena, and yet, not as selfish and powerful as the pagan goddess who once owned my first name. A string of 1s and 0s would represent me better than those names ever could, yet, I cannot suppress it.

Parts of them still hold me. Katherine watches when I shout to a room full of people who already have a better pick in their minds to just give me a chance, Selena smiles when I finally get my first compliment, and Ana signs inwardly when I call her over to whitewash me again.

ASK me, what my name is. I will likely respond differently each time. And that is the beauty of human hypocrisy; it transcends time periods and language and upbringings — exactly like the fire that threatens to burn it away.