This is a very personal piece of writing that I am sharing to give explanation as to why those who have known me a long time may hear newer students calling me naj.
I’ve always struggled with my name as a thing that almost does but actually doesn’t quite fit. My birth certificate says “Jennifer Anne Jacobsen”, but I have never been a Jennifer. The only person I can recall ever calling me that with any regularity was my paternal grandmother. I think my dad used it for a minute, but gave up fairly early on. My mom called me Neffer, spelling it like that, with two effs, ever since I can remember. By the time I reached high school the fluffiness of those effs had started to make me feel like a puppy, and in an attempt to grow the name up and maybe exotify it, I changed the spelling to Nephyr. This made it fit a bit better, but it continued to tug a bit, or fall off my shoulders.
I added my middle name as the author name on the books I wrote, for the first time owning the Anne, being Nephyr Anne as a writer, and that brought my name a bit closer to fitting, but it still tended to squeeze in the wrong places and snag on corners. And no one actually called me Nephyr Anne.
I’ve considered changing my name many times over the decades, but I worried about if someone from my past wanted to find me (same reason I kept my maiden name when I married), or if it would come across as pretentious, and besides, there wasn’t another name that was clearly the right one.
I’m going to change topics for a moment, bear with me (pun intended).
Last fall me and several thousand other people found out about Fat Bear Week, a week in early October when people all over the world vote on which bear at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park in Alaska has gotten the plumpest in preparation for hibernation. My son was sick with covid on the other side of the country, I was stressed and worried, and watching the bears on the bear cam live streaming on Youtube, and voting on them with my son gave me reprieve from the world. The bears were a corner of peaceful covid-free beauty where silly humans voted on them with zero politics, all friendly bear love. Something deep inside of me rested when I watched those enormous furry fisherbeings catching salmon in Alaska.
I made a new Youtube account for some reason in relation to watching the bears; I can’t remember exactly why; but I had to pick a new user name, so I randomly chose my initials, NAJ. I looked at my initials and suddenly saw them not as separate letters representing names, but as a whole that pierced into me and said “this is you”. naj.
I felt instantly shy about this knowledge, tucked it away, and didn’t tell anyone.
It was simultaneously big and important and tiny and personal. It was a secret that I carried around. I am naj. shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone.
One by one the bears lumbered off to hibernate through the winter in hidden dens that not even the park rangers know the location of. The falls emptied. The bear cams, solar powered, turned off for the long dark Alaskan winter.
Sometimes I doubted it Maybe this is silly. Changing names is so…. Fill in the blank. Trendy? Pretentious? Needy?
Sometimes I didn’t think about it so much.
In early spring I was having a lot of anxiety again. Climate change, Ukraine, daily mass shootings, no one caring about covid, people beating each other up on airplanes. It was piling up inside of me and I felt like I was constantly pushing something persistent and fragile and nasty away from my edges.
Then the cams in Alaska came back online and the bears started to come back one by one lumbering, all skinny from their winter sleep, to the river. I started engaging with other bear watchers around the world. I joined a Facebook group of people talking about nothing but bears. We all held our breath together wondering if this year Otis, the oldest bear in Katmai, would return, and we all cried happy tears when he did. People in Australia, Germany, me here in Oregon, all crying happy tears because an old bear in Alaska made it through another winter; it was like sanctuary. The calm of the bears, and the shared sweetness of humans in a world ever more divided came together to heal something cracked and in danger of splitting apart inside of me.
Watching the bears stilled the chaos. Grounded me. And made a little voice whisper quietly in my head, “I am naj”.
I got to know the bears. Grazer who is a fierce mama, chasing away any who got too close to her, 747, biggest bear at the falls; a positive mountain of fur and muscle, all of the COYs (stands for cub of the year, new spring cubs), Mystery Bear; a new comer who stayed around for about two weeks delighting us all as he stole our hearts, as well as fish from other bears, and played in the water like a cub despite being full grown, and then disappeared leaving us to miss his antics. And sweet bear goddess Holly, almost as old as Otis, known for having stepped outside of bear norms to adopt an orphaned cub.
The name felt intensely connected to the bears. It welled up inside of me asking to be let out whenever I turned away from the constant to-do list and gave myself a few minutes of just watching the bears fish. naj.
I finally told Aaron that I think my name is naj. He was not so sure about this turn of events. I tried to explain that it’s connected to the bears, but what sense does that make?
Lately it seems like everyone is changing their name, and changing their pronouns. It’s hard to keep up. I struggle to remember people’s names even when they haven’t changed them; not from lack of caring, it’s just how my brain works; or doesn’t work. Certain things are hard. I’m not good at faces either, not until they have been strongly etched into my long term memory. I’ve learned to tell my students at the end of a workshop not to take it personally if I run into them two weeks later on the street and look blank; I just need them to remind me of their name and context, and all of the love for them born of the workshop will flood back into me. An old friend who is staying with us constantly mentions names from high school and I have no idea who he is talking about; probably someone I once desperately wished would befriend me.
Seems like kind of a lot for someone who has to energetically kick herself everytime she calls her non-binary friends with a gendered pronoun by mistake and yet still does it again, to ask folks to remember a new name herself.
So I kept quiet. Except that I started telling baristas that my name is naj when I ordered my dirty chai. And I practiced it as a sign off on e-mails to strangers, with my full name “Nephyr Anne Jacobsen” in the byline underneath so that they could just see it as initials if they liked.
Last week I told my Thai medicine teacher about the bears and my name, certain he would laugh at my silly earnestness telling me to do whatever I wanted, don’t worry about it. Instead he said “give me your time, place, and date of birth and I’ll check to see if it’s good”. A couple of days later I received this missive “...in fact it would be best if your name starts with a “na”. So then naj is perfect”
So here we are. If you want, you can call me naj. Pronounced like Taj in Taj Mahal, but with an n of course. Or you can call me Nephyr - because that’s also a name of mine, like how there are places other than my current home that are also home. I just thought I’d tell you my secret because well, the bear cams are broken this week so I had a few extra minutes, and I’ve been meaning to explore this corner of bravery (because I still feel very very very shy about it). Do what you want with it.
Fat Bear Week has come and gone again. 747 won this year. He does not know or care, but we all rooted fiercely for our favorite bears knowing that in the end they are all winners, for the competition raises awareness of the bears, nature, the parks, the importance of keystone species and of taking moments in life to simply enjoy the fact that somewhere far away there is still a very strong salmon run, and some majestically beautiful floofy creatures sitting in a cold river getting pudgy for the winter.
The bears are once again disappearing to their secret dens and Brooks Falls cams are going offline more and more. When they are on there are hardly any bears. I wish them a good hibernation.
-naj
written October 2022