My Name’s Chosen Female Lineage
Names are important. What we call ourselves is important. We repeat “I am” like an incantation over our lives, for the good and the bad. I am smart. I am strong. I am capable. I am ugly. I am sad. I am alone. Those sentences make us — they make me — feel very differently when I say them out loud. Words have power, and they have even more power when we claim them as our own, when we place two syllables that pack so much punch before them.
I am.
That’s possibly even more true in our names. Sometimes we don’t notice names because they’re just always there. They’re ours. We like them or we don’t, but it just is what it is. No changing, right? A few rare people change their first names. More, particularly women change their last names. But recently, I felt the incredible power of getting to pick an entirely new name for myself.
I chose what name I wanted to go by online. And spoiler alert for the life of Cassandra, “Cassandra Morann” is not my real name. Or, at least, it’s not my full name. When I decided to become more public, I knew I wanted a bit of distinction.
Partly, this springs from a youthful desire, a fascination with the idea of pen names. It was just such a romantic notion, to pretend to be someone else so you could be more honest, revealing, about yourself and the world around you.
Another piece is that it allows me to be distinct within myself. I’m still me, but I get to put on a specific hat when I write as “Cassandra Morann.” Of course I am always going to be who I am, but it’s a specific part of me. It’s not exactly the same person my students see, when they call me by a different moniker. It’s not exactly the same person my family sees when they have the heritage of my last name.
And that’s what it really comes down to, why I went with the name I did: heritage.
When I was young, I would write under wildly random pseudonyms. One I remember clearly was “Avery Welsh,” and I have no clue how that one came into being. But when I sat down and asked myself who I wanted to be when I wrote and discussed, the name that came out was Cassandra Morann.
Cassandra is my real first name, and I love it. I went by Cassi for years, but always planned that, when I was an adult, I would go back to Cassandra, and I did. Cassandra has a beautiful and tragic history, namely the princess of Troy from Greek mythology. But I have always felt like a Cassandra, and I found I couldn’t give that up. That’s the part of my name that is only mine.
I also didn’t want to go by my “real” last name. My relationship with my father is…complex. It’s also not a particularly catchy or aesthetic last name, so there I was, a Cassandra without a second name. And what rolled off the tongue was what my mother so often called me: Cassandra Morann. My first name and my middle name. It feels like such an obvious route now, but it had never occurred to me before, and as I meditated on the role of that name in my life, on the meaning of Morann, it became perfect.
Morann isn’t really a name, at least not with two n’s. There’s some Celtic connection, but that certainly wasn’t in my grandmother’s head when she came up with Morann for me. It was invented by my grandmother and bestowed by my mother, to me. It was, I realized, a name with a female lineage, and I wanted that.
I could have gone by my mother’s maiden name, but that belonged to her father before her, and his father before that. Any name I picked from my family history was awash with patriarchy. I actually plan on changing my name at marriage — I’m a bit traditional — but professionally, I wanted something change-proof. This gave me that as well.
So Cassandra Morann stuck, and I’m proud of it.
I believe what we call ourselves has power, whether our name or things about ourselves, silently or out loud. I’m not advocating that everyone run down to the courthouse and change your name, but maybe take an extra minute, if you haven’t, and think about what your name means to you. Research the history and the power in it, because it’s there, even if you don’t know it yet.