What’s in a Name?

“O, be some other name! What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”  -Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2

What’s in a name?  I began my life as Ellen Herrnstadt, I am now Sara Crosby.

As Juliet reasons, in this famous balcony speech, one is still the same person regardless of the name they are called.  Juliet wishes for Romeo to be called anything but Romeo Montague for that name is an enemy of her family.

As I was growing up I thought of my own name as my personal enemy.  If I could only be someone else, I could belong. I would be happier. At the age of 23 I paused in “the space in between” to consider my response to an opportunity to change my name. Somehow, I thought that if I could change my name I would be a different person.  I didn’t understand yet what Juliet understood; it is not the name that defines a person at their core. But, I get ahead of myself.

It is difficult to tell this story without first laying some ground work regarding my mother.  She was a remarkable, creative, smart, and beautiful woman. Being the only surviving daughter of refugees from Eastern Europe, she carried with her the burden of worry, of not being enough, and of depression into her adult life.  As a teenager, I felt suffocated by her concerns, I pushed against her need to protect me from being hurt and her inability to differentiate out where she ended and I began.

Her name was Helen.  Yes, that’s right, Helen and Ellen.

Cue the born rebel in me. I chose to fight back, to separate out where my well-meaning, sensitive mother ended and I began.

Mother was an actor and when I was in 5^th grade she had been cast as Mrs. Soames in a production of Our Town. At the director’s request, my parents asked me if I wanted to be in a play and, thus, my love affair with the theatre was born. I discovered a magical outlet for my intense imagination and sensitivity. I had found a place to belong, not as Ellen, but as someone else, someone I could create.  I could slip into the skin of a whole other human being and not be Ellen for a few glorious hours before I took the makeup and costume off and faced being Ellen again, with my skinny arms and stringy hair and my overly sensitive reactions to the world around me.

Several years later Mother and I were cast in a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Since Yente and Chava have no scenes together, I was able to maintain my autonomy…until the reviews.  “Helen and Ellen quite a team” was right there in print for, what was then, my whole world to see!  I was 16 years old and the last thing I wanted was to be associated as my mother’s team mate! I made the commitment to one day change my name.

Some 7 years later, when I went to the Actor’s Equity office in NYC to become a paying member of this coveted union of stage actors, that commitment still rang in my head.  I took a breath as I signed my name, Sara Herrnstadt on the application.  At that moment I became Sara, and although the name suited me better, to my surprise, Ellen, persistently came along with me. Maybe the problem wasn’t just my name. I had made a choice to respond to my lack of self-worth, to my negative self-image and my need to separate out from my mother, by changing my name, only to discover that I was still me.

Today, I do feel I belong, I belong to me, I am Sara to everyone who knows me. My dad asked me once why I had changed my name, and I replied simply that I really didn’t like the person Ellen was very much. In reality, it was, and is, so much more than that.

By choosing to change my name, as a response to my need to find self-worth, I gained the wisdom that Juliet understood. It is just a name. Change comes from inside ourselves. Ellen or Sara…I look into the mirror each morning and know that no matter what comes at me that day,

I get to choose.

I get to choose if I will respond to the world out of a deep sense of self-worth, out of my sense of belonging to me, or whether the response will come from that shy, self-doubting shadow girl from my youth, Ellen.  Either way, “a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”

From what place inside yourself do you most often respond?

Remember, you are the same person whether you choose to like yourself or not.

You get to choose.