Name Change...Post Script

So I was walking my dog, Lucille, (who started out as Lucy but there were too many Lucy's at the pound), Lulu, Luciloo, Lulubelle, Lucille Diana...thinking about my name Vivi Sojorhn and if "Amanda" really can ever be gone and this is the image I got:

Amanda, the name of origin, with various last names is the piece of sand in the oyster of this life.

Abrasive to me for whatever reason, but causing a life unfolding to this point where "Vivianne *Vivi* Sojorhn" is the magical sheen, the opalescent pearl.

I forgot to mention that Pearl and Pearle were on my list of names that didn't make it. Maybe this will be my middle name after all.

Name Change: Part 4, Finally Choosing

Lady of the Lake, 2012 (c) A. M. Johnson

How did I finally land on “Vivianne Sojorhn” with a proper nickname of “Vivi”? It is so very different from my given name, my married names and all of the names I’ve auditioned before. It sounds foreign. There is nobody on Google sharing it. I had no problem getting a URL, or a gmail address for it. 

Vishnu and Ananta

About six weeks ago I started with names that sounded a lot more like my given name, “Ananda,” “Ananta,” “ Amandala,” and the list goes on. I liked the meanings and sound of the names. Ananda, for instance, was Buddha’s closest disciple, and known for his deep memory, and the name means “bliss” and is rather androgynous; though, more boys have it than girls. It also, I was told by a friend who knows, belongs to an incredible musician, the nephew of Ravi Shankar, Ananda Shankar. “Ananta” relates perfectly to my identity with Kosmic Egg Projects as it is the Cosmic Serpent that Vishnu dreams up the entire universe while riding. I really got attached to that name for a while, not that I am Hindu myself, but because one of my favorite books for the last decade has been “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge”. However, I felt like I was in a hall of mirrors with names that were close to “Amanda” to the point where I found myself feeling that “Amanda” was a close as it was going to get. I would forever be drifting on “almost” no matter what I chose.

“Why not stay with Johnson?” I have been asked more than once as if I must be changing that name because I may leave. It is not for that reason at all. Johnson has been a very safe name for me. I have felt taken care of like never before by that name. During all of my health crises it has been a chrysalis in which I licked my wounds. It is clear to me now though that I feel like I’m hiding behind my husband by his name. My wings need more space for my own journey. I need to stand on my own roots.

For a last name, giving in to the idea that “Mojo” was not going to win over those closest to me in a respectable way, I fell upon “Journey” almost right away. I figured that whatever I put in front of “Journey” would be descriptive of how I feel about life itself. “Blissful,” “Dreaming,” “Kosmic,” etc all worked in front of “Journey,” but something about it was, well, too on-the-nose. Being a writer has given me the opportunity to name many characters along the way and I really do not like when a character’s name is so on-the-nose that knowing the name is knowing the entire story. It is a personal glitch that I could not abide by after a few weeks. I like a little more mystery and a little more personal detail than “Journey” could give me.

Holy Journey, Oil Pastels, 2012 (c) A.M. Johnson

Letting go of “Journey” reminded me of how many characters I’ve named, and I went searching in all of the names I’ve used in scripts and stories. I even looked at names that were high on the list for my kids’ names before they were landed. Elenore is one of my favorite names, and all of the derivatives - Noura, Norah, Lenore, Ella. Then there was Stella, after my great-great aunt and idol, Stella Starr and the Congo Parade. Names of characters I loved like Esme, Morgan, Codi, and writers I love, Barbara, Virginia, and Willa became possible. I looked at my grandmother’s names, Babette and Mary Kathryn (to be honest there are many Mary Kathryn’s now in my mother’s family and that, in truth, made the decision negative). As I went deeper into names of characters I began to think also of how to make sure it would be my name and not just a character’s name. I didn’t want to go back to a nom de plume. 

My answer was to take one or two letters from my birth names and put them in the names that I chose to audition. I also looked at what numbers were related to the names (a system used by the Kabalarians became essential) and how they added up to complement my own number 7. Things became very complex. You may have notice I’ve not done as much artwork in the last month or so. It is really because I’ve been playing an incredible puzzle called, Finding My Own Name, that includes meaning, known characteristics, numerology and pure inspiration. I guess it makes me feel the name has gone through a sort of gestation period to equal this surrender. I bow my head to my discovery.

On Our Way, 2012 (c) A.M. Johnson

The name "Vivienne" means “alive,” and that was most certainly me. After all I have been challenged with in the past, I still struggle everyday to be awake and living as fully as I can, but I won’t give up. I get the feisty feeling that what must be done will be done. As my own father described me recently as being “bad ass,” finally, this made me laugh. Even if my original name didn’t quite land me in that persona, I managed to make it to this point. Frankly, I had fallen in love with Vivienne, but it was missing something.

I started to blend in letters from my name “Amanda”, “Vivimene,” “Vivan,” “Emneiviv” and finally landed on “Vivianne” which seemed perfectly natural. “Anne” means grace, or graceful, and I loved that combination “Living gracefully,” “Graceful living,” as it is something I aim for (often doing pratfalls along the way, but I laugh!). I really also wanted to keep the “Vivi” part because I always wanted a nickname I felt great about, something easy, and what could be more lively than “Vivi”? Vivianne still needed a last name. 

I started shuffling the letters and adding one or two from my maiden name, as I had with “Vivianne”.I did not even try to bring the “M” in as the temptation towards Mojo, was gone. I used the “R” and the “S” and then I realized that the “S” was already in “Johnson”. So I narrowed down to the “R”. It came like this: first Roshjon, then Oshrojn, then Shojorn, and finally Sojorhn. I tried switching the “R” and the “H” to Sojohrn, but you can see that now the “R” and the “N” look like an “M,” so I dropped that. Of course, I loved Sojorhn as soon as I came upon it because it related loosely, not too on-the-nose now, to journey. 

Arcanum Two, Oil Pastels, 2013 (c) Vivi Sojorhn

Finally, someone asked me how it feels to change my name to Vivianne “Vivi” Sojorhn.

This is how it feels to me as I remember that I am Vivi Sojorhn now. I am no longer standing on the edge of reason. I have jumped. I cannot worry if it will work out because it must. How I move my wings or find my new bridge depends on how I serve the name, not how it serves me. As you know me as Vivi, Vivi shall be known and so I shall do my very best and that is all that is possible now. It is both thrilling and frightening and there is no turning back.

I am Vivi Sojorhn

Name Change: Part 3, Change Is An Inside Job

After the Fire, Digitally Painted, 2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

For me, the externalized expression of my name follows many, many internal changes, many changes in my physical existence, and lots of determined growth, not the other way around. I am only a month or so shy of being 49 years old, a point I consider and hope to be the middle-ish part of my life (and that might be stretching it considering what I've been through lately). Why in the world would I change my name so “late in life”? It seems, perhaps counter-productive to have to re-establish recognition, especially in a world of transparency where I have done much to establish “Amanda Morris Johnson”. I have lots of love that comes my way with my old names. Am I rejecting all of that? No. I don’t believe that I’m tossing out my history at all.  If I did, that would be pure illusion. It is not as if I’m a young Hollywood wannabe with a PR person in charge of rewriting my story.

Right now I am embracing my own growth and telling you my story because it all goes together.

Self-portrait 2013, Digitally Painted, 2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

So, the past five years amazed me almost constantly about what I thought I knew and didn't know, and what I do know but cannot count on beyond this moment. Both monstrously challenging with health falling down and getting back up again, but also coming to terms with my identity as being actually very strong, and not victimized by challenge. I am very flexible and appreciative of every moment good or bad. That has meant a huge release of my own expectations. I am very much alive and kicking.

Understanding that making little shifts can lead anyone to an entirely different arena, I see that I have made HUGE SHIFTS. All of these huge shifts (divorce, encore marriage, serious loss, brain surgery, new found career in art, rediscovered career in publishing) have simply landed me in a world that I feel so differently about that I barely recognize my old ways as my own...except the feeling that my name has been chained to my heart rather than shifting along with me. The expectations of who Amanda is have not let go and once again, I realize that this has to do with boundaries more than anything else.

Started out a Summer's Day,
Digitally Painted, 2013(c) A.M. Johnson

It is clear to me that actually physically leaving a very violent situation after 18 years was far more effective in changing the course of my life than changing my surname ever would have been. It is clear to me that I am right to have outgrown the family name I originated with but traveled far from both in distance and experience. It is clear to me that loving myself is more important than earning someone else’s love in shaping my experience. Those names are simply reflective of where I once was, and I do not owe anything more to them. Now I want to see myself, hear myself as I am today.

Surprise!, Digitally Painted, 2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

Didn't brilliant Shakespeare write, “A Rose by any other name smells just as sweet,”? However, this comes out of the mouth of a naive girl, Juliet, who wants what she wants what she wants. In fact, during the play, “Romeo and Juliet,”  Shakespeare points out just how important names are for defining a whole life and death scenario, and how they are reflected in the actions of his characters, the Capulets and Montagues. Perhaps, if the kids had been willing to entirely change their names and move onto a different world right away, they could have seen a different outcome. Fighting with names and their history turns out to be a deadly proposition. But I digress on philosophical whims about quotes used out of context.

Metamorphosis, Oil Pastels,
2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

Examining who I am today is a huge factor in choosing my name. How am I different from “Amanda Morris,” “Amanda Conti,” and “Amanda Johnson” in my own heart?  Is it possible to actually let go of a name that has been with me all of my life, coming from people who loved me or hated me, and from histories that were much longer than my own life? Hell yes, no need to harbor a stranger in my heart. Is changing a name like digging up roots and cutting them off? Hell no! It is growing strong roots that actually nourish me rather than fantasies.

Chrysalis, Oil Pastels, 2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

Still, the reactions of those closest to me, primarily my children and my husband, are really important. My husband is largely responsible for making our marriage a safe and ultimately the most incredibly freeing relationship to me. He says is it my choice, of course. Yet with only the slightest bit of worry in his eyes, he asks me, once I’ve found this name that fits, “So, will we still be married?” Of course we will still be married! Maybe we will have another wedding, though, I say with a grin, and he agrees! My children get excited about being the ones to name me, and shoot out a slew of choices. Some of them are really good and some of them are as funny as “Mocojo!” Will you still be our mom? Of course, I will still be their mom! Maybe it deserves a ritual to clarify all of this.

It is important to state here, I think, that I have already gone through a great deal of re-positioning myself with my family of origin. Going through divorce, marrying again, and health crises puts one in the position to reassess how a family works. The shifts are all real and physical for me already.

As a friend, Matthue Dayarus, a great name changer himself, said in response to my announcement, "changing the sound that other people fetch you by is a great boundary condition.” 

For me changing those boundaries started, bit-by-bit, long before finding this name did, and so I must emphasize that I don’t believe changing my name is going to be more than one of the conditions in a process already underway. It is a really good one though, and so when I came upon my very different name I noticed very different boundaries, ones that clearly stated that I am my own responsibility and my own expression. I still have connections to my family, to my past, but that is not all I am. It is as strange to me that this is such a miracle to me, as it may be to you, but there you have it. Like I was a caterpillar and now I have wings.

Name Change: Part 2, The Real Search Begins

Yes. I did that. I tried out “Amanda Content” and I had business cards that said “Content Content” because I loved the double entendre. It truly makes me grimace now. However, the need to separate myself from the past came on more quickly and strongly than I expected as my wasband and I grew more distant, and anger was roused easily. Suddenly in the midst of creating this brand, I found myself in the process of getting a divorce and wanting to make sure my children understood that I identified the last name “Conti” with them, that they were my family and that I would keep it for a feeling of consistency. This is something my mother did when she left my father, and I had really appreciated being the cause of her last name. As bad as it had been, I could not deny its gifts.

My family of origin, of course, encouraged me to return to “Morris,” the argument being that I would never have to change my name again and of course that “Morris” should identify me. It came up often that first year of freedom to the point of feeling a bit like badgering. I can’t say why I didn't do that except a general feeling that after all I had been through in life, and how far I had gone and come back again on my own, I felt I’d outgrown the name of my youth.  Still, the name stayed on the table as I drifted through my Argentine Tango phase, my many initiations in Freemasonry, and falling in love again.

Then I got married for a second time! My name could be “Amanda Morris Johnson,” and all of the past could be erased in a moment, I thought. I changed it publicly so that I would be known by that name from then on, but somehow I never made it over to the Social Security offices. My name legally remained “Amanda Conti” and does to this day. It began because I wasn't at all sure how my kids would adjust to me being in a committed relationship with someone other than their father. (They’re doing really well with it, incidentally.)

It carried on, I believe, because the symptoms of my brain tumor started to take over my life in terms of energy for the simplest things. I became a split name, unsure of how to sign anything, how to answer the phone, how to send out messages. In one world, my friends, I was definitely known as Amanda Morris Johnson. But on paperwork, by the U.S. Post Office, by the document, the bank accounts, the health insurance cards, I was still Amanda Conti. Talk about disassociation from a name! All this to say, it is not like I never felt a fear about changing my name.

The next level of name changing that I entered, as I coped with my new life, was how to blend my family’s names into a new surname. I had seen this way of naming work really well for couples that stay together, and also for little babies whose parents did not marry each other (either because of it being against the law, or because that was their philosophy) For several years I considered “Mojo” the obvious choice for a last name. It made me laugh with delight. My kids threatened to ban me from all public situations if I actually went with it. I thought it fit my writing a Tarot book and other magical tomes really well. They swore it made me sound like a naughty woman with huge boobs from an “Austin Powers” movie, not that I’m not. Wink. My husband related it to liberal media. Har. We had great commutes to and from school laughing about the potential reaction to “Amanda Mojo,” and, when I was drinking coffee, it often had to include two letters from my kids’ last name to become “Mocojo!”  Nevertheless things on the name front really did not budge at all, nor did it land.

Name Change: Part 1, The History of Some Names

Many people have asked me about my name change. How come I’m changing my name? How did I find “Vivi Sojorhn”? What do I expect from changing my name? How did I find the courage to change my name so suddenly? I found that I could not answer as if these were simple questions because my name has been with me as long as I can remember and there is a lot of history there. I figure the first time I really had an inkling I wanted to change my name was because I spent so much time naming the characters I wrote about. Then more so  when I was naming my own children, seeking out a name that felt like a gift to them, something they could stand carrying around. That is two decades ago. It has been a long process, like a lifetime practically. This entry is about how it all started.

I was named “Amanda,” after a black jazz singer in Chicago by the name of “Amanda Ambrose.” It took YouTube’s creation for me to finally hear her, but nevertheless, this is what I was told from the very beginning. In itself, it never bothered me for a moment that I could not verify this voice. I used the persona of a black jazz singer coursing through my name, as begging material to make friends with my black classmates by announcing now and then, “I was named after a black jazz singer,” in hopes of verification that she was someone to be named after. Certainly she was, but it wasn’t personal, I don't think. It was a lark.

I asked for more information about my name choice and what I got was that the name sounded cool and unusual. One parent wanted “Samantha” and the other wanted “Amanda” and “Amanda” won because the chooser was carrying me in her belly. I often wondered if I'd have been different had my father won. I don’t remember when but I started to seek out the meaning of the name. I’ve always been a little obsessed with words.  Later than childhood, but before I was fully adult, I learned that “Amanda” meant “worthy of love,” and that definition stuck with me ever after. It caused me to secretly wrestle with the notion of valuing love somehow and finding what is worthy and what is not. I started to question if it meant that I was worthy but not loved. Life is rough for teenagers...

Daddy and Pooh, Oil Pastels on Board,
2013 (c) A. M. Johnson

My maiden name, “Morris,” entered my family as they traveled to the Wild West in something like 1857. It was attached to my great-grandmother, May Eppstein, and her twin sister, Lillian Eppstein, because they married brothers Adolf and Ernest Morris. They, along with several of May and Lillian’s other sisters founded amazing Jewish organizations in Denver like the Denver Jewish Community Center, and Temple Emanuel, and made the Jewish Hospital, National. Adolf, my great-grandfather was an architect, and I know was a very good painter, better than I am, because we have his self-portrait and a few lovely landscapes of the early days in the state of Colorado on family walls. I carried obnoxious pride in my maiden name for a long time for their efforts, for my grandparent’s love and for my father’s talents and interests. My first name change happened on April 30, 1988, when I married my first husband. I was a conservative young lady and took my first husband’s family name, “Conti,” on the promise that he would take “Morris” for his middle name, too. I should have known.

That never actually happened, and testament to the importance of the carriage of names. It took me a long time to learn to manage my names, and I do believe this has to do with boundaries. I still kept signing “Morris” in the middle, though, as I had never had a middle name. For 18 years I was known as “Amanda Morris Conti”. Sometime later I learned that “Amanda” could be “beloved” and I embraced that definition of myself as well as I could in a difficult situation.

I had thought “Amanda Conti” would hold together and was fairly unique. Then I had my first website and  Googling became a normal activity. Therein I discovered that, in fact, there were other “Amanda Conti” women and even another in my own small town of Boulder, Colorado. Since the other one had a very different lifestyle than mine, with two young children, and a freelance writing career, I felt that the need to stop placing such importance on my family connections as it could be temporary after all. I think I did harbor the illusion that if I changed my name I could stay in the same life but it would be better. My first-time consciously chosen name change audition came as a purely professional “nom de plume,” and related to the new career of “web content provider”. Har.