Please pause this persistent predilection pertaining to periodically passionate patterns of pretentious perceptual processing.

Sometimes thought processes get stuck, disconnected, trailing sinew and silken tissue in tragic agony, alone in the vastness, discarded, forgotten. Language has always felt to these sensibilities as a game; a tangled tale of otherwise tired terms and pithy patterns of phrase, of accents and admonitions, just another mode of expressions to become lost within, an entertainment of the mind otherwise disengaged.

Silly games of phrase aside, what is this about personas? It’s once again for the forty fifth time come to my attention a simple question which is worth a simple answer.

The question goes like this:

“Eva who? Winter… sssh own? Winter–schOEn? Winterschön? Ok. Where did she work before? .. and before that?”

or perhaps more directly,

“Eva who? I thought her name was Madeline, or Annaliese?”

Indeed, who indeed. Many in my professional life know me as a middle name, “Madeline”, or a secondary “Annaliese”, or a one or another variant of their own recollections of Eve or Eva, Anna or Lisa, Madeline or Madeleine (like the cookies). I too enjoy those cookies, but I’ve never cared about the formality of names at present, nor during the years of my maiden name, those early formative years with trauma from which the family failed to protect, and so eventually their surname had to be therapeutically removed (entschuldigen Vati, ich weiß, dass sie verstehen).

Some ask my preference, and the response is mostly always “whichever you prefer”. I’ve never felt a strong personal attachment to any name at all, though I do have certain memory based aversions.

I certainly didn’t like having to deal with the later years of having a stalker, of assaults, of the red tape required by a name change, of relocation and another relocation, of new email accounts and licenses and passports and registrations and everything else. Who I was was taken from me by force, not of choice.

So life moves on, and here we are. However it may be, the name is just a name and nothing more.