What's In a Name?

            I always thought pen names were fascinating, ever since I discovered the Harry Potter books. Something about the name J. K. Rowling was incredible to me (this was before she revealed herself to be a person with many terrible views that I do not endorse at all). I liked the way that it sounded. It wasn’t long after I discovered the word “author”, after winning the “Top Author” award in my third grade class. There was something so magical about that word next to my name. Combine it with the lilt of a pseudonym with letters and last name and I loved it even more (thus KJ Bell). I’ve had several pseudonyms over the years, with various plans for all in different genres of writing.

            I created Rob Caldwell six years ago, when I was nearing the end of my music education degree. I created him because there were things that I wanted to write about but didn’t want to have potentially become a problem in my teaching career. By placing these topics under a different name I could shield myself from any controversy that might be thrown at me by school administrators, parents, or students. It’s been made clear over the past few years that is a moot point now, because the odds of me being in a classroom full time are now very slim.

            I created T. H. Bradshaw years before that, the name coming to me when I was writing random poetry in high school. It came up again in college during a music theory assignment where we had to write a piece of music in a certain style set to a text. It was too much for me to handle having my text and my music critiqued, so I hid the half I wasn’t being graded on behind this other identity.

            That’s what I realized I’ve been doing with these pennames; I’ve been hiding. I’ve created safety nets. One was meant to protect me professionally and the other personally, because somehow the things that came out of the pen when I was writing as T. H. Bradshaw seemed like they were coming from a wounded core of me; the most fragile center of my being. I thought that placing the shield of another identity between that fragile center and any possible critiques was the best thing I could do. I never thought about what possible damage I might be doing to myself in fear of hypothetical damage from outside forces.

            Tonight while working on some backlog writing and having a difficult time writing for Rob I asked myself the question, “what am I doing with Rob anymore?” Cue an hour and a half of existential crisis, manifesting as a lot of sitting and staring at a blank page while my mind buzzed, then looking into bulldozing the website I created for publishing the work of these identities. Finally I came to this page to try to sort it out, which is what I usually do to sort things like this out.

            When I got to the page and the ink started flowing a realization came to me, born out of working in therapy and reading the amount of self-improvement type books that I do; these identities were one more way for me to hide from myself.

            I have been doing that in some manner for my entire life, running and hiding from parts of me that I didn’t want to examine, parts that I had labeled as wrong for one reason or another. I started making my way back in that time after college, when I gave myself permission to write again, and I began cranking out content, much of it under those pseudonyms, spreading the safety net of my alter egos below me. One thing I heard constantly in my research on creative people is some variation of “if you have a safety net you’ll always fall back into it.” This is usually said in reference to getting something like a nursing degree in case being an actor doesn’t work out. I always hated it when I heard it – felt like it didn’t apply to what I was doing. Now, here tonight, I wonder if that is the reason that I haven’t been able to put any of these things I’m working on out into the world with any consistency and get them to stick, because I had the fallback of my pseudonyms.

            So now the question; should I abandon them completely? I think that I have to. I think that I have to because the idea of it scares the crap out of me. I think I have to as another step to really embrace my own identity. And I think I have to because I deserve to not hide anymore. I deserve to not justify or explain myself by avoiding it altogether. I deserve to live my truth. So I am going to do creatively what I did in my personal life about a decade ago and come out of the closet. If this is anything like that experience it may lift weights I didn’t even realize I was carrying.

            I don’t know what may or may not come of this new coming out, just like I had no idea what life would be like on the other side of the other one. All that I know is that I owe it to that eight year old who marveled at the word author next to his name to actively put that name on the things he produces. It has become clear that everything I do, I do for him, that boy in my past. He deserves everything I can give him, because I denied him so much, for so long. So I am KJ Bell, and this is the beginning of my new era.