Welcome to my public journal, as I didn't know what to write about.... but everything's a mess, so I'm going to write about said mess.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Paige. It's not my first name, but that's the name I've been introducing myself as lately. For the last almost 20 years, I've not gone by that name once. However, I moved and I thought I'd start a new identity. I'm not transgender, if that's what impression you got. I simply shifted one part of my life from the identity of my first name, to the other part of my life to my middle.
The people from home still use my first name, and I actually prefer it. It makes me slightly uncomfortable when they start using my middle name, if we are being honest. So lately I've been playing two roles.
Why would I do this? I don't know what sparked the initial idea to reinvent myself, and I don't see it as being inauthentic, or anything of the sort. However I do believe you're never the same person from one given day to the next and that's what makes you, well, you.
The Me, from home is everything about me that people have come to know (or think they know) about me. The people that have the honor of calling me by my first name are the ones I love, trust, and admire. On the other end of the deal, some of those people are also the ones that I want to distance myself from, because the old me died when I moved here to Texas officially on New Years Day.
So why I've decided to change who I introduce myself as, is clear. New people in my life meet Me, as I am, but they lack background in knowing what I've been through and what I'm about. They, at the same time, don't deserve the honor of my first name, but are honored with knowing the Paige that is here and now, and the people from home do not get to see that version of me.
Long story short: I'm a girl that is just navigating this world one day at a time. I'm a human in this new world rat-race that just wants to Be, and if no one understands, well. That's the beauty of it.
-MPD
