Me/name
Facts about my chosen names:
Woozle
- It derives from a scene in the children's book Winne-the-Pooh.
- See Wikipedia for an explanation of where it comes up in the story.
- See MathOverflow[1] for a discussion of Woozle-Hunting (spoiler: they still haven't found me)
- My parents started using it as a nickname during the first week after I was born.
- It's the first name I remember being called.
- It has always felt clearly like it refers to me, is me.
When I first switched schools to Durham Academy in 2nd grade, my teacher (Mrs. Land) wouldn't let me sign my work "Woozle" anymore, and made me sign by my full name. I went along with it at the time, because I was an obedient child – but in retrospect, I wish I had kicked up a fuss.
I only adopted [deadname] because it was better than the full version of my first name – and I didn't think of doing that until several years later.
In high school, there was this one incident where Jenny was trying to get my attention and kept calling "[deadname]! [deadname]!", but it wasn't until she called out "Woozle!" that I heard her. She mainly called me "Woozle" after that.
I think it was at that point that I started to realize that allowing them to take "Woozle" away from me had been a mistake.
Unfortunately, I continued to use "[deadname]" in most contexts, because I thought I had to. I finally realized in 2017 that this was also a mistake, and legally changed my name to "Woozalia Nicola"[2].
Woozalia
In the mid-200Xs, Harena and I were on a very small IRC server where we got chosen to be IRCops. As part of that process, we had to create an alternative login with a different username. I found myself thinking "need an alias for Woozle... a Woozle alias... "Woozalia"? -- so I used that.
Later, when I was setting up a web site for my creative stuff (this one!), I was thinking that "Woozalia" could also be seen as "Woozle -alia" -- where "-alia" as a suffix is often used sort of like "paraphernalia", stuff related to the subject, i.e. stuff related to Woozle.
...and then when I finally got started with transitioning and name-changing, it occurred to me that "Woozalia" actually has a nice feminine ending to it and could, in fact, be viewed as the non-diminutive form of "Woozle". I therefore declared it thus, and made it my legal first name in mid-June 2019.