Hannah Clague

My mom swears up and down that she thought she was being creative when she named me Hannah. It’s a palindrome, she thought, it’s classic, classy, backwards-forwards clever. In naming me, she gave me my individual identity, two syllables that would come to mean me, to define to the exclusion of everything else the collection of cells and experiences that I am. 

My mom thought she was being creative, but, in retrospect, it seems this was not the case—I was one of five Hannahs in my high school graduating class. There was me, Hannah Clague, as well as Hannah Glick, Hannah Mabie, and Hannahs Gauss and Kline. Five baby girls, all born within a few months of one another, all named Hannah. Apparently, a lot of moms took a liking to palindromes in 1996.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my name. It’s pretty, and the palindrome thing is, after all, pretty cool. Though it’s been around for awhile, Hannah doesn’t carry the same dusty antiquity as Ethel or Gertrude or Maude. It feels fresh; two syllables is long enough to make a statement but not so long that they clog the tongue. I like the three sets of double letters, and the fact that—if you use all capital letters—it can be written entirely with straight lines. I like how the shapes swirl together when I sign my name in cursive, and how robust the fat leading H looks on the page, standing strong and proud, announcing my existence. The name Hannah itself is not the problem.

The problem is this: My name is proof that I am not unique.

I went to a fairly homogenous school. There were outliers and misfits, sure — my twin sister’s name, Michaela, was one of a kind — and we had a few under-represented minority populations, but many of the members of the class of 2014 were more or less the same; 400 mostly-white, middle class, intelligent teenagers with educated parents and liberal values ran around that building for seven hours a day. This is the hazard of growing up in a university town, I suppose: Ann Arbor’s particular brand of collegiate hippy chic attracts a certain type of people. People who, apparently, like to name their daughters Hannah.

So, then, what does fourteen-year-old me do? I am lost in a sea of kids who look like me, dress like me, act like me, talk like me, think like me. I am indistinguishable from the crowd. When my name is called, four other heads look up. I am trying to be my own person, to make my own friends, to get into college, and I don’t have anything of my own to make me special. But is this a bad thing? Do I want to fit in—to wear what everyone else is wearing, therefore protecting myself from the wrath of unwelcoming high school bullies—or to stand out? Is my sameness a privilege, a gift, that should be welcomed and savored? Or is it my prerogative as a human to be unique, to be alive in a slightly different way than all the other people in the world, so that I may affect it singularly, as no one else can?

Herein lies my internal paradox of identity: I want to be able to see myself as an individual, to find validation that I, distinctively, matter to the world. Yet, I also long for the sense of safety, of power in numbers that comes from belonging in a larger group. Is my name indicative of my lack of individual purpose, or of my nominal right to belong here, to take up space in the world?

We Hannahs are not alone in our search for individual identity. As C. R. Snyder and Howard L. Fromkin write in their Uniqueness: The Pursuit of Human Difference, “the need to see oneself as unique is a potent and continuous force in our society,” one that has driven thinkers into action for a long time. Uniqueness-seeking is not, as many psychological phenomena are, “simply a symptom of a particular period in history,” but a longstanding, possibly universal desire for independence from the norm. 

Though this “Uniqueness theory” has only recently begun to be studied empirically, the pursuit of uniqueness has long been well documented in literary thought. In “Give Me Back My Fingerprints,” poet Leonard Cohen wonders whether “[his] fingerprints / get lonely in the crowd. / There are no others like them / and that should make them proud.” Here, Cohen places his individuality within a broad societal context, recognizing that although his may be unique, everyone has fingerprints. His identity, while in some ways specific to him, is shared by everyone else in the world. He recognizes that his sense of individuality is a false one, yet expresses the desire to nonetheless derive pride from it.

I see the plethora of Hannahs of my age reflected also in literature’s Doppelgängers. An apparition of German folklore, “double goers” have a long history of terrifying the people they visit, appearing in identical form to mock their victims with too-realistic visions of themselves. In E. T. A. Hoffman’s Signor Formica, Signor Capuzzi sees an actor who appears to be a double of himself onstage while attending a play. Capuzzi is so shocked and overwhelmed by the sight that, in a state of great emotional unrest, he climbs up onstage and begins to fight with his Doppelgänger. This challenge to his uniqueness causes him to leap to the defense of his individuality. I feel a similar call to arms when I come across a Hannah. Suddenly, I need to defend myself, defend my right to my own name, against someone who also wants to claim it as their own.

Meeting someone with whom you share an identity that is supposed to be your own is like catching an unexpected glimpse of your reflection when you didn’t choose to look in the mirror. I want to be the proverbial Fairest of Them All, and it makes me uncomfortable to meet someone who is equally as fair—as well-read or as personable or as kind—because it diminishes my own accomplishment of metaphorical beauty. Mirrors force you not only to recognize yourself and accept the way you appear to others, but can also lead to painful self-scrutiny, as you try to find ways to differentiate yourself from your reflection.

For me, a person who often sees herself reflected back in others, the search for uniqueness seems vitally important to defining my own place in the world. A few weeks into the rehearsal period for my seventh grade musical, Aida, the director chose more specific roles for each of the chorus members, divvying up such illustrious titles as Museum Guest and Nubian Slave. Thirteen-year-old me was thrilled to be assigned the sought-after role of Hat Model, one of the dancers in Princess Amneris’ expositional number, “My Stongest Suit”. As a Hat Model, I would be entrusted with the honor of walking down the make-shift runway during a climactic imaginary fashion show, sporting a large, gaudy sculpture atop my shoulders. This role specified my identity within the world of the play; I was no longer just a generic ensemble member, but a woman of Amneris’ court, one of her ladies-in-waiting, someone trusted to strut down center stage with equal amounts of sass and the ability to balance precarious objects atop her cranium.

My initial excitement over my selection as Hat Model was very much diminished, however, when I discovered that the three other girls cast as Hat Models were all also named Hannah. Suddenly, my newfound specialness was sucked away. I hadn’t been chosen because I was good enough, or particularly suited for the role, but because an indifferent director noticed that there happened to be four girls in his cast who all had the same name. He was trying to be objective, I think, to let our nominal fate decide the casting rather than playing favorites, but it stung nonetheless. My selection wasn’t indicative of my talent, my uniqueness, but of my sameness.

My fellow Hat Models and myself, faced with the confusion in rehearsal of never knowing to whom the choreographer was giving direction, assigned ourselves nicknames. I was Hannah Gold, because the large Sphinx I was meant to have the neck strength to hold up was so colored. Hannah Blue wore a boat on her head, Hannah Green a plant, and so forth. Morgan, the actor playing Amneris, wasn’t called Black, despite the shadowy cat-sculpture-turned-headpiece she unveiled as the final showstopper at the end of the number. She, unlike any of us Hat Model Hannahs, had not only a differentiating lead role, but also her own name.

Names are meant to differentiate us from our peers, from the other students on our class roster and 1996 babies in the social security database and Hat Models on a cast list. There aren’t enough to go around, and I am left wanting for uniqueness the way a blank coloring book wants a 50 piece box of Crayola crayons and an enthusiastic toddler: I am currently in black and white, blank, squished between pages just like me. I want to be colored in, to be different, to be bright and diverse without being garish or distasteful. I want my own unmistakably large gold Sphinx hat. I want my own name, something bigger and bolder, something less symmetrical with its own set of cute, catchy, non-color-related nicknames. I want to be unique enough to be chosen not for my sameness but for my individuality.

Yet, I often catch myself measuring myself against others, looking for sameness. As I walk down the street, there is some small part of my consciousness that constantly searches for women who look like me. My bodily Dopplegängers are hard to find; I’m shorter and more hippy than average. As far as I can tell, most classically beautiful women are tall, and those who aren’t look like mini scale versions of the tall ones, still long-legged and proportionally perfect. I worry that my deviation from these standards of beauty make me unattractive to the general population.

About a month ago, I was browsing in Literati, a local independent bookstore, absentmindedly opening intriguing books to a random page and sampling a few paragraphs before moving on to another. Several novels deep in the middle of the fiction section, I was taken aback to recognize my own body in a description of the protagonist’s best friend in Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures:

Kimmie is shorter than I am and more rounded. She is not fat, but her body has an inch- thick padding of warm softness over its entirety. She is somewhat pear-shaped, with broad hips and small breasts, but boys find her irresistible…

I’m not at all sure about “irresistible,” but I surprised myself with the amount of relief I felt at the discovery of myself in this book. I take so much comfort in the existence of this passage, in the realization that not only are there are other women who look like me, but that we are worth writing about. Gloeckner could have invented any type of girl she wanted for Kimmie, and she chose me. I happened upon my own identity staring out from the pages of a book, and instead of feeling threatened, I felt validated. Rather then being offended by evidence of my lack of uniqueness, I see this passage as proof of my own legitimacy. Screw uniqueness: in this instance, my sameness is what helped me feel my self worth.

Sameness can also create a powerful sense of belonging. This February, inspired by the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation and Leslie Knope’s commitment to spreading female empowerment, my seven female college housemates and I threw a Galentine’s Day party. Boys were not allowed entrance until midnight, when the clock struck February 14th. Until then, our living-room-turned-dance-floor was filled only with young women, clad in various shades of red and pink, celebrating our womanhood and our togetherness and that we didn’t need anyone but each other to have a good time. Apparently, all college-aged women know every word of ABBA’s iconic “Dancing Queen”; when it played, the room was swollen with pride in our womanhood and in our mad dancing skills and our slightly-off-pitch belting. Suspended in the middle of the third identical repeat of the chorus, I felt so strongly connected to these girls, to being part of something bigger than myself, that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to cry or to hold hands with everyone in the room at once, creating a chain of energy and ABBA that couldn’t be broken. Instead, I danced, embodying with everyone else that legendary dancing queen.

In that moment, we were the same, united under a single roof and a single purpose. The homogeny of the partygoers is what made it so special—we were there in celebration of our shared identity, of our gender, something that makes us slightly different from your perfectly-privileged straight white cisgender male. I’m not always one for parties—they make me anxious and hyper-conscious of this discomfort—but at that one, I found myself wrapped in a wave of warm, fuzzy gratitude. I was so happy to be there, to be welcomed unquestioningly into this group of women. My lack of uniqueness, the ease with which I blended into the population at the party made me feel so whole, so completely accepted and loved and warm, that I didn’t even mind when Hannah Strat (future housemate) and Hannah Mabie (ex-high school classmate) walked in the door, ever-so-slightly chipping away at my momentarily abandoned, yet still raw, uniqueness.

This feeling, this overwhelmingly warm togetherness, is the stuff of revolutions. A shared collective identity, or the sense of belonging to a group, is—as Aldon  D. Morris notes in his Frontiers in Social Movement Theory—“an announcement of… connection with others,” something that fulfills the inverse of humanity’s need for uniqueness: the need to fit in, to belong, to be a part of something. This desire for normalcy, while opposite from individuality, is felt equally as strongly. It can, as Morris argues, “function as [a] powerful selective [incentive] motivating participation.”

Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper support this theory in their Collective Identity and Social Movements, “collective identity,” they explain, has shown a huge “prominence in contemporary [social] movements,” and can be used to understand what drives people to mobilize and fight for change.

Take, for instance, the recent gay rights movement. Here, a group of people are united behind, and driven into action in defense of, a single collective identity. They fight to gain respect for their uniqueness within the larger population by which they are persecuted. Yet is it a movement focused on marriage equality as a symbol of acceptance and equal human rights, on the desire to prove sameness: that the LGBTQ community is not so different to be less deserving of the rights given to straight couples. In Sidney Tarrow’s portrayal of the 1883 gay and lesbian march on Washington, he reminisces that the organizers of the march, in an attempt to put forth their demands in a way that would not further alienate their opposition, “[play] down their differences before the media and the country while celebrating it [sic] in private.” Thus, the shared aspects of the activists' identity, not their uniqueness, was powerful enough to create change.

So, if collective identity is so powerful a feeling, one that can motivate social change, one that I myself experienced so strongly while dancing with my housemates, why, then, do I still feel this overwhelming need for uniqueness? When I’ve felt that sense of belonging, why am I willing to leave it behind? 

Maybe it is this: I am safe in my privileged collective identity. I take for granted these parts of myself I find boring; in reality, they protect me. Holding my normative collective identities, I am free to search for ways to differentiate myself. I could poke one toe out of the tightly-lidded box of my blondness, my straightness, my classic femininity, my education, and no one would mind much. It would be hard for me to, in attempting to find my own differentiated identity, discover one that is frowned upon. My privileged identities shield me from any questioning of my claim to certain human rights, as may be seen still in the LGBTQ rights movement and in yet-unsolved race issues stemming from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I already have what so many others fight for; I should be grateful that I am the same as everyone else, that what I think of as plain, overdone characteristics label me as “normal”, and, being so, I am safe in my own skin.

Collective identities are important and powerful, and I am lucky to have them. But, there is still a part of me afraid of accepting them completely. By fully acknowledging the degree to which I blend into my demographic, I limit myself to definition based only on these parameters, which are, while powerful and validating, not at all unique. What does this lack individuality mean for me? Will I no longer matter to the world? I feel a bit like a worker honeybee—one of a population that is of vital importance to the overall functioning of the hive, but individually dispensable. When a bee goes out and in defense of his hive loses his stinger and therefore his life, is his sacrifice appreciated? Is he remembered by the rest of his bee buddies? Am I okay with living in a world in which, while helpful, I am easily replaceable? 

Maybe an answer lies in the idea that unique individual identity and collective identity cannot be entirely separated for one another. They are firmly intertwined; one cannot be fully understood without the other. In their thesis for Washington State University, Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke argue that there is so much overlap in the discussion of individual identity theory and social (i.e. collective) identity theory that discourse becomes “redundant,” and that considering the two together as one “can establish a more fully integrated view of the self.” 

An example: My friend Elle attended an all-female Catholic high school, to which the students were asked to wear standard-issue plaid skirts and white blouses. Though Elle says she felt like she was wearing a boring, beige, blank canvas to school — a get-up that suggested to the world that she was devoid of personality — she wasn’t, really. She was a student who wore a plaid skirt and a white blouse five days of the week. This reality wasn’t her choice, but it was nonetheless fact. Elle was not unique in her clothing, yet that uniform was a part of her identity. If she had ignored her Catholic school identity because it was not unique, she would have not been fully representing herself. Likewise, I am a conglomeration of my unique and collective identities; considering only one without the other would not yield a full, accurate picture of me.

Though Elle wore the same uniform as 100 other girls, that navy and maroon plaid skirt still helped define who she was. Thus, if individual identity can be shared among a large group and still true of the individual, is uniqueness really such a vital part of understanding ourselves? Does it matter that there are so many other Hannahs in the world? My name is still Hannah, whether or not other people identify with the same name. That my name is shared doesn’t make it any less mine.

Why, then, do I still feel so territorial over it, so disappointed whenever I meet another Hannah?

Maybe, in some ways, my territoriality is ridiculous—it rests solely on the assumption that six letters, two each of three, are able to encompass all that I am. I’m not sure that any name could; words alone can not fully represent personhood. Maybe trying to reserve this piece of identity for myself isn’t worth it, because having parents with similar aesthetic tastes doesn’t necessarily mean anything about me, or about any of the other Hannahs. 

Yet, Kenneth L. Dion posits in his Names, Identity, and Self that a person’s name is, in fact, strongly tied to her sense of self. And, if a name is able to influence my idea of my own identity, shouldn’t it have the same effect on others? When people hear my name, they think they know something about me, about my race or my origins or my family. Presumably, they’d infer the same about any Hannah: that she’s white, Western, from a family possibly familiar with the Bible. These assumptions are not false, and they connect me with a larger story, a history of women, a group of girls alive now who can smile knowingly at one another when introduced by a mutual friend. 

So, then, is my name something that I should identity with on an individual basis, and fight for the singular right to, because its two syllables are all I have to define myself? Or is it something that I should be proud of for its broader meaning, for the connotations it carries and the women it connects me to?

Do names offer validity through differentiation or through connection? Was I named to make me special, to give me my own line of the phone book, or to connect me to the society around me, a normal name presumably carried by a normal person?

The lieu of definite answers, I remind myself of this: I am what I am. Regardless of names and labels, of uniqueness or sameness, I am a collection of identities glued haphazardly together to build me. I rejoice over the strangeness of my middle name, Beryl, as a symbol of my individual worth. I stumble upon myself in a book, and feel validated. Uniqueness offers society something that it may not have had before; it is an opportunity for growth and for diversity, for a new viewpoint. Any individuality I could offer the world secures my value as a part of my community. Paradoxically, my sameness—sharing traits which are known to be helpful to society and which belong irrevocably to the group of people that push the world forward—also instills in me a sense of self worth. Uniqueness and sameness stand directly in opposition, but I want for each in spite of the other. That someone would at once strive to cultivate both seems impossible and ill-advised, like one is embarking on a endless, fruitless, Sysisphus-like journey for sense of self. 

It’s not in vain, though. Together, unique and collective identities work to build self worth and prove legitimacy, in their own ways arguing my place as a valuable human in the world. Both are needed to validate one’s own existence. I need both to make myself feel whole.