In the three months that I have been home now (three months!) isn’t necessarily where my favorite country is or what my favorite food was; instead, I find the most difficult question to be one of the simplest questions:
“Do you go by Alexandra…or Alex or something else?”
I freeze up, and I start tripping over my own words. It’s a question that right now I am still trying to figure out the answer to.
Growing up, I was Alex to all of my friends and my family (except for my brother, Michael, who has never called me anything but Alexandra), and it suited me perfectly. I was a tomboy who wanted to be exactly like her older brother. I was the kid out boogie boarding in the ocean all day, or the kid running around the soccer field or getting kicked out of basketball games. I was the kid playing man hunt until all hours of the night who hated wearing dresses and who lived in a Chicago Bulls Jersey or a Mia Hamm jersey. I was very much an Alex.
I started to shed most of my tomboy layers as I got older. I gave up my Chicago Bulls jersey for Abercrombie and Fitch or Roxy. I wasn’t ever a girly girly, but slowly I was changing. It wasn’t until I was I did my university in Italy that I started to identify myself as Alexandra. I just felt different. I felt more like I was growing into myself. I started to take an interest in makeup and jewelery. I developed an obsession for boots and started buying jeans that suited me nicely. I started reading Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and I became involved in cultural issues and topics that hadn’t really been a part of my life before. I came home from that trip as Alexandra, and many of my closest friends uni know me as just that.
I continued to introduce myself as Alexandra. I wanted to be called by my full name, and for a while I was. My friends in Korea called me Alexandra as did many friends I met through my travels, but my nickname was always Alex. It was never anything else.
It wasn’t until I moved to Australia that I took on a name that really hadn’t existed before. I didn’t want to be called Alex, and Alexandra wasn’t going over so well, so I started to go by Ali (though I always wished everyone would spell it Allie because I liked that spelling better).
My stepsister and a couple of my best friends from home (Alexis, Laura and Francesca) had always called me Allie (yes, spelled Allie) as a term of endearment, or if I called home or sent a text after a few weeks of not speaking and they were excited to talk to me. I have asked that my niece call me Auntie Allie because it has a better ring to it. I had always referred to myself jokingly as “Allie Babez”, a nickname I would use to talk about myself in the 3rd person when I was feeling overly confident in a situation that usually resulted in failure or some sort of embarrassment. In these situations, it feels just fine.
But for the better part of the past two and a bit years, I have been introducing myself as Ali (despite my dislike for that spelling). Most everyone who knew me in Australia called me Ali (and yes, almost all of them spelled it that way except for two people). It was natural. It didn’t feel awkward, and it didn’t feel weird or out of place; it fit like a glove from day one. I may have hated the spelled out form of it (it just always reminded me of the boxer), but Ali became a name and an identity I carried with me through my years in Australia and onto my backpacking trip until I arrived back in the States on 18 June.
As I sort of shuffle through my identity crisis of who I am right now, I am coming to realize that my name plays a major part. What once felt like me doesn’t anymore. Ali just doesn’t fit well in as well the States (maybe the accent of my friends overseas helped), and the only people really who knew me as Ali are my Little Mount flatmates and the friends I keep in touch with from traveling.
Outside of that, though, introducing myself as Ali has disappeared and it’s starting to feel awkward, like I am struggling to fit into a pair of jeans from high school that I very long ago outgrew. I tried to carry Ali as my nickname into this next chapter as best as I could, because it gave me the ability to hold on to the last shreds of a life that isn’t there anymore.
“I prefer Alexandra,” I try telling people, “but you can call me Ali.”
And the longer I am home, the more Ali awkwardly stumbles out of my mouth. It makes me sad to let go of it, but I just don’t feel right introducing myself that way anymore. It hasn’t felt right for a long time now.
Maybe one day I’ll figure it out or one day I’ll easily slip back into Ali, and who knows what other nicknames will come in to and out of my life. Everything has a time and a place in life, and Ali did all she could in the time she had.
She lived a really decent life the past few years, and she definitely made a name for herself.
