What is a name?
A name is what you go by. It’s a way for people to identify you, and for you to identify yourself. Names can have positive and negative connotations. The name Liza Minnelli reminds me of my 5th grade teacher, Miss Crane. She called me Liza Minnelli and encouraged me to keep writing. Sometimes she drove me crazy with her red penned edits on the stories and essays that I handed in to her, but I will always love her.
The last name Liuzzo fills me with fear and dread, and the last name Purcell fills me with a weird mix of sadness and disgust.
Somewhere between 6th and 7th grade, I got sick of there being at least three other girls who called themselves Liz. I wanted to separate myself from those Lizs, somehow. I decided it would be cool of me to change the spelling of my nickname from L-I-Z to L-I-S.
I know. I know. L-I-S does not spell Liz. It pretty much spells Liss, as if I were named Alyssa. It also spells LAME.
But in my twelve-year-old mind, it was cool as the other side of my pillow. Forcing an S to sound like a Z was so cool, in fact, that I decided to make everyone I knew spell my name that way, or else they received a lot of whining. (What I should have been working on instead was weaning everyone in my family completely off of calling me Beth. FUCK that nickname is stupid. I’d then managed to get mostly everyone to stop with the Beth, but even today there is one person who still stubbornly slips now and then. And I’ll tell you, if you are ever feeling like dying in a painful, “Let me get my head chopped off” kind of way, just call me Beth.)
Unfortunately, just like any nickname, the stupid S stuck. Liz because Lis, and people started to actually go with it. (Looking back, I should have spent my energy on convincing people to do something more beneficial for me, like buy me my own condo on the beach or something. My power of persuasion is apparently good, though it takes a lot of time.) Even now, a lot of people still spell Liz with an S when giving me gifts or writing me notes.
And suddenly, it just looked really fucking stupid to me.
“That says Liss, not Liz,” I said to myself one day. “Oh man, that’s dumb.”
But how can you kill your own Frankenstein? Especially when the Beth Frankenstein lumbers right next to it?
“Oh man,” I said. “I have way fucked up.”
To make matters worse, my little cousin Katarina took it upon herself to make Elizabeth — or ‘Lizabeth, as she sometimes calls me — sound like the coolest name in the world. It took a long time for my full name to grow on me, but Kat made me LOVE it.
“I can’t make people call me Elizabeth now. It’ll confuse the hell out of them, and they might even question my sanity. Like, really, who changes their mind about their name every five years?” I mulled this over day after day, until seeing L-I-S literally made me want to scream. (Though not nearly as loud as B-E-T-H makes me want to scream. And puke. And kill people.)
So one day, I said casually to the people next to me, “Spelling my name with an S is dumb.” And I stopped doing it. And I told them to stop doing it.
And people still do it anyway. I think they’re all so confused, they don’t know what the hell to call me anymore or how to spell it. I have, indeed, created a monster. The Lizlisbethenstein is coming to eat us all. Hopefully it eats Bethenstein first.
