Hannah Clague

Hey. You made it. You read that, hopefully the whole thing. Thanks. I really appreciate you taking the time to read what I put a lot of time into writing.

Remember the last thing you just read, my conclusion? That section of the essay—the big wrap up, the moral of the story—was the hardest part for me to write. It was the section that fluctuated and changed and morphed the most over this semester. Going in, I knew what ideas I wanted to examine—names as a metaphor for identity, the need for uniquness, identity theory, a general quest to find a legitimacy for my strong feelings about my name—but had no idea what conclusions I would possibly be able to draw. In some ways, writing this essay has been a way to wade through all my previously held ideas and figure out what it is, really, I think about it all. The concluding section felt important to me because without it, the rest of my essay could read as just a bunch of my own musings, haphazardly stuck together right after one another, with no clear meaning or punch line. My arguments are built around "maybes", and I knew I needed to end with something more concrete.

Draft One Grand Conclusion: You're not unique to the world, but you matter anyway, especially to the people who are near you.

John Lennon’s purposely incomprehensible “I Am the Walrus” begins like this: “I am he as you are he as you are me / and we are all together”. These lyrics not only speak of a shared, indistinguishable identity, but also of the fact that we are all here, together, in the same boat. Sure, I’m not unique; I’m not a special snowflake, but neither is anyone else. No one is special in relation to the whole world—“we are all together” here, so many of us that there are indubitably other people who share even our most unique traits. We are, however, important to those in our own small corner of the world. We are special to the people we meet, the direct empathetic relationships we create. There are people in the world to whom I am the only Hannah who matters, for whom my name doesn’t need a qualifier like “Gold” or “Clague” or “Little”.

My mom gave me a name that is shared by many other girls. But I am her only Hannah. Within my own piece of the world, that is what matters.

Leading staight off of my high school essay, my first draft of this paper was all about uniquness. It was me, spewing my thoughts and my insecurities into a Pages document. It was simple, followed a single thread, and built logically off of itself. It wasn't that diverse an argument, but to me it felt huge. It was the first time I'd ever gotten the chance to pull a set of thoughts that have been nagging at me for a long time out of the back of my mind, dust them off, lay them out flat, and really examine them. I was relieved to find at those beginning stages of my project that there exists research and terminology to prove and define the things I've been feeling my whole life. There's that powerful collective identity again: other people having felt and studied these ideas made me feel like what I felt was real.

I never loved the concluding section of this draft. It felt like a cop out, like it was me proudly procaiming to the world that noone is unique and then immediately turning around, patting my audience gently as I soothingly mumbled that it's all okay, it doesn't matter anyway, don't worry about all those things I just spent nine pages telling you. It felt like I was placating my readers and myself, and like I didn't really actually believe what I was saying. I knew that I needed to formulate a new conclusion, something stronger and more reflective of what I actually believe.

Draft Two Grand Conclusion: I'm stuck between uniquness and sameness, which kinda sucks, but it doesn't quite make me uncomfortable enough to do anything about it.

I’m often tempted to change my name, but I know I never will. I’ll risk musical associations to Hannah Montana, and confusion over whether my housemates are looking for me or Hannah Strat when they yell our shared name up the stairs. No matter how much I long for individuality, I am not wiling to change vital parts of my identity solely to gain uniqueness. I either have it, or I don’t. I want to be special, and I want to belong at the same time. Whether I am and whether I do depends not on changing me, but on changing the people with whom I surround myself, the characteristics of the groups of people within which I am placed. There are people in the world to whom I am the only Hannah who matters, for whom my name doesn’t need a qualifier like “Gold” or “Clague”. Alice’s “great puzzle,” then, may be solved not in a quest through Wonderland to find herself, but to find other people, in relation to whom she can discover her own validity.

Next, I tried to complicate my linear, too-simple first draft by introducing the opposite of uniquness, collective identity, or what I often refer to throughout my essay as "sameness". This created a conclusion that was a bit more nuanced, thought it kept some of the same "you are the center of your own corner of the universe" material.

This conclusion, I think, is still a bit weak. It is an attempt to reconcile uniquness and samenes within me, but, once again, I do my best to avoid the meat of that conundrum by proclaiming that while this paradox of identity is a bit uncomfy, it's all fine. I don't really care. In this way, I think that this conclusion, too, undermined my points, brushing them off rather than cementing them.

Draft Three Grand Conclusion: Uniqueness and Sameness work together to build self-worth.

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.

Finally, now, I've arrived at something that feels full, strong, and true. I came upon this conclusion after realizing that in my attempt to complicate my arugment with a discussion of sameness, I'd ended up throwing around far too many synomyns for different theories of identity. I'm fairly certain that to everyone but me, my second draft read like I'd typed "uniqueness" into thesaurus.com and peppered my work with every term that came up. On the advice of Ray, my professor, I combed through my essay, pulling out all the terms I'd used, and made an idea map. When comparing my charts for each side of my argument, all the clouds whirling around my brain suddently partred and I saw clearly the similarities between the two. I realized that I wanted to talk about both uniqueness and sameness as they relate to self-worth. There, finally, was the mental connection I'd so far been unable to make: my essay isn't just about how I feel about other people having my name, it's about how those feelings do or do not contribute to my sense of self.

Repurposing Project Grand Conclusion: Thank goodness I'm done, but also that I did it.

Though I am admittedly excited to take time away from this paper (to hopefully create a mental void in which I may develop new thoughts rather than just churning these same ones around in my head for another four months), I am so grateful for this essay and proud of myself for having written it. Yeah, the grammar's not perfect (I write like I think, in long strings of clauses stuck together), my viewpoint is narrow and one-sided, and I probably could stand to fact-check against alternative sources of research. But, as I've worked my way through these drafts, I've learned something about myself. I took thoughts that have been floating around in my head for years and put them under a microscope and blew them up and finally figured out what they mean to me. Like my essay, this semester has mostly been about the process of uncovering the conclusion.

So, now that I know how I feel about my name, maybe it's time to expand these concepts beyond myself. Onward and upward to Remediation.