losing count of my existential crises

ni·hil·ism  /ˈnīəˌlizəm/

Noun The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. Extreme skepticism, according to which nothing in the world has a real existence.

Maybe this isn't the right word to describe my thoughts over the past week. I haven't rejected moral principles or been extremely skeptical. I have, however, spent a lot of time thinking about how tiny and insignificant I am, and--by extension--how insignificant the entire human experiment is.

It kind of started with a presentation at school. This presentation set out to explain a bit of local geology but with the Carl Sagan inspired idea that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. To describe the formation of a lake in BC, we needed to start with the Big Bang.

I don't remember enough to go into it in detail but suffice it to say that the universe is unimaginably big. Literally. I reached a point where I couldn't imagine the universe having no edge but I also couldn't imagine an edge. That was the end of my imaginable consciousness. How can something expand if it's already infinite?

Inhale. Exhale.

If you can picture me lying on the cork floor of my school on a Wednesday afternoon, laughing in odd spurts to myself as a classmate whispered, "She's having a breakdown," you will have an accurate depiction of my life last week.

Why am I even writing this? I don't really understand. Really, what is the point of anything? I am a trifling, albeit multicellular and complex organism, living on a rock that is both huge and comparably minuscule, rotating around a ball of gas, that's spinning around a galaxy, that exists among an infinite number of other galaxies, in a universe that never ends.

Suddenly, my life doesn't seem to matter anymore. Or maybe it does matter, despite everything. Or maybe it doesn't matter but it also doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. But no, I think it matters. It matters but then at the same time it doesn't and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

"what's your name anyway?"

It's just a name. I want to say I don't understand why it's such a big deal but I do. People aren't their names, yet we're certainly very attached to them. We take on the symbols and labels we have--some are chosen, some are assigned to us. They become us and we become them. So it goes.

Around the time of my eighteenth birthday, I started to play with this idea. I wanted to try being not-Alex. I was ideally situated at the beginning of a two month road trip, travelling to places where no one (save for my three companions) knew my name.

I went for it. I started to introduce myself as Lexi to our Couchsurfing hosts (I was persuaded the 'i' was better than a 'y' like I wanted). It was hard because I wasn't completely unknown, travelling with my mom and sisters. It's not the best for your name change when you introduce yourself as Lexi and then your mom tells a story about this girl named Alex and no one knows that it's you. Even when my mom referred to me as Lexi, it felt somehow wrong. I didn't like the way it sounded in her mouth.

The other thing that bothered me was how close it was to my mom's name, Leslie. I would have chosen Lex but my sister and I decided if you were going to change your name you should do more than drop a letter.

Anyway, it didn't really work. Starting school in September with a boy named Alex that everyone knew, I decided to try again. It bothered me to turn around whenever I heard someone say Alex and realize that nine out of ten times, they weren't talking to/about me.* "I'm Lexi," I said. "My name is Lexi."

The weirdest part was hearing people use it. The "Hey Lexi"s were strange for quite a while--still kind of are. I was surprised at how easy it was, though, surprised that no one questioned it. I shouldn't have been, but I was. I felt like everyone should have been able to tell that Lexi wasn't my real name. As far as I know, they couldn't.

After a couple months, I decided I didn't really like it. I didn't hate it but I also didn't feel like Lexi and Lexi didn't feel like me. I gave myself an adjustment period but it wasn't sticking. I kind of gave up on it a bit, introducing myself to new groups as Alex again. Then all hell broke loose.

Do you know how annoying it is when people start an interaction with you by saying, "What's your name anyway? I'm so confused,"?????

It's pretty fucking annoying. Excuse my language. It's one thing if someone asks you what you prefer to be called, or which name you want to go by, but to have someone tell you that your multiple names CONFUSE them? Annoying as fuck. I feel like the appropriate response is, "Do I look like I care that you're confused?" Because, for the most part, I do not. I'm not yet the girl that would say that with attitude when confronted, whether you call me Alex or Lexi or Axel. Maybe one day.

I want to relate this to gender expression and those who get asked to clarify their gender on a regular basis but I don't know how to do it in a respectful way. I'm not saying that my struggle with this is on the same level as anyone whose gender is regularly questioned. I guess I just wanted to say I'm sorry that happens to people because my instinct reaction is to hit someone or curl into a ball. And that sucks.

I'm transitioning back to Alex in a slow, mellow way. The most amusing part of this story was that a girl named Lexie joined my (tiny) school last week. It goes to show that you can change your name to avoid confusion but in the end, it is futile. I don't know what's happening now. I don't police people using my name/s. As long as I realize you're talking about me, I don't really care.

Maybe that's weird. Maybe I should care more about the four letters that are supposed to represent me. But I don't. What.

*I still do this. It turns out it's hard to not react when you hear your name. I do also respond to Lexi, though, so that's progress.