Hannah Clague

My first period class in the first trimester of my first year of high school was ninth grade English. The first assignment for that class was the infamous "All About Me" essay. Poetically titled "To Tell the Story of a Hannah," my final draft began like this:

“The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words.” – oxforddictionaries.com

I don’t know much about obsolete words. If you ever look at a list of the top twenty girls names the year I was born, Hannah is always somewhere in the first three. My name is everywhere; it’s all over my school, and the rhyming pride of one of America’s biggest pop stars. It’s pretty much as un-obsolete as you can get. There are still a bunch of little Hannahs being born.

And ended like this:

I want to be special. Everyone does. One of my biggest fears is to blend in with society, to not be noticed by anyone except the people who lived with me for the eighteen years of my childhood. I don't want to be just another Hannah. I want to be Hannah Clague: Broadway star, famous author, always-to-be-remembered heroine. Or even just good singer, good writer, nice person. But right now, I’m just another Hannah, one of hundreds in the world. And that's okay with me.

For now.

Despite my questionable assertion that Hannah Montana was ever one of "America's biggest pop stars" (2010 was a dark time), the feeling of being theatened by the popularity of my name was clearly present in 14-year-old me. When asked to introduce myself to my teacher, my first instinct was to defend my uniquness against what I assumed would be my new teacher's massive struggle to remember which Hannah in my class was which. After this intro, the body of the essay is mostly concerned with singing my own praises, naming each of my accomplishments one by one to prove to my teacher that, despite the usualness of my name, I was special. I basically used my same-old-same-old name as an excuse to brag about myself.

Starting the Repurposing project for this class, I wanted to try again. I wanted to consider the metaphorical implications of having a common name in a way that didn't just serve as a platform for self-lauding. I wanted to compare my own experiences to those of others, and try to legitimize way I've always felt and with real-life research done by real-life scientists. I wanted to go back and google the actual definition of "obsolete", use it correctly, and then meaningfully integrate quotes from sources that aren't shoddy online dictionaries.

Here, folks, is my Repurposing project: What's In a Name? It is my attempt to acknowledge my lack of uniquness and consider it in a way that moves past myself. Nonetheless, I hope you like the name Hannah, because you're about to hear a lot of it.