My neighbors have been calling me the wrong name for two years
I did this on purpose
Hello pals, I’m fully back after two months of constant travel and work, kids returning from a gap year and college, and levels of humidity that regularly take my brain offline and make me want to stab air. Let’s catch up!
• Coming off of my essay in MOTHER TONGUE, Naomi Krauss of
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• Very nice to see BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY included on this list: “What books should divorced women read?” by
• I really appreciated this short post (and the fact that BYSSH is included here, too!) “Why I Buy and Promote Substackers' Books” by
• Thanks to my friends at GLORIA for linking to a popular recent post of mine in one of their latest, “A New Pursuit”
My neighbors have been calling me the wrong name for two years
When I was leaving my apartment this morning my neighbor called out, “Good morning, Kim!” I hate being called Kim. I hate it so much. I didn’t correct her, just like I don’t correct any of my neighbors, because I did this on purpose. Sort of.
It was an accidental—then a purposeful—decision I made two years ago when I moved to Divorce Town*. I was moving from an apartment I loved to a condo I didn’t to satisfy the logistics of shared custody for one year. I was moving during the first weeks of July, a stretch of days that were disgusting and swampy. As I trudged and stank back and forth from my car to my new place with boxes and piles and things-that-were-too-heavy-but-too-late-now, I probably didn’t have it in me to correct anyone who asked me my name and I said Kimberly and they still went on to call me Kim.
What is wrong with people, I wonder frequently in general, but specifically when it comes to this whole name thing. It happens to me at least once a week. I stopped using Kim when I was 18 in favor of using my full name when I moved to Los Angeles. That’s 38 years of being called a name I hate a minimum of 1,976 times. It’s not that I hate the name Kim for other people, I hate it for me, and that’s enough of a reason. When people get huffy when I correct them about my own goddamn name I have to wonder, should I change their names to something I prefer and see how they like it? Grow up.
Anyway, I’m sure while I was moving and sweating and lifting that I just didn’t have the energy (or the breath) to correct my neighbors repeatedly, or at all. Those first few days passed, then many weeks, then I realized it was just getting too late to correct them without it being weird. Somehow their mistake was going to start being my fault.
Within months I realized that this was a good thing, actually, because I didn’t want to get too comfortable. It’s easy to let a place grow on you. And we’ve probably all had the experience of finding ourselves stuck in places (and relationships and jobs and cities) longer than we should have or ever intended to. I wanted to stay uncomfortable in a way that would remind me, almost daily, that I did not belong here. I wanted even the friendliest overture to be undercut by the understanding that while these were nice enough people they were not my people.
So this morning, with my MacBook in one hand along with my keys and my bag sliding down my arm, two coffee spills having already landed on my black dress an hour before, I half-waved and responded to the “Have a good day!” with “Yup, you too.” and I shuffled my way to my car. Knowing it’s not much longer now. Knowing I’ve stayed uncomfortable. Knowing there’s only six more months to go.
*In my experience most condo complexes are places of transition, more so than neighborhoods full of single family homes. They’re populated by the divorced or soon-to-be-divorced, young couples trying to get their foothold in the real estate market, and empty nesters and the elderly who have downsized for the first and last times, respectively. This isn’t a judgment, just an observation, because bitch I also have access to a pool :)
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