Regina Noctis

I don’t usually say much about how I came to choose Christophine as my username in so many places. I might mention that I stole it from a book, but not usually much more. I don’t get into why that particular name. I rarely mention which book I stole it from. When questions about why everyone chose the usernames they have in the online venues I’ve frequented have surfaced, I certainly wasn’t going to get into all the why and wherefor. I usually don’t answer at all, or toss off the odd occasional comment about the book.

The book was Electric Forest by Tanith Lee. I discovered it when I was in high school. I had zero self-esteem at the time, but lots of intense self-loathing. Much of that was directed at my appearance. I was a bit chubby, but saw myself as disgustingly fat. I referred to myself many times as a land-whale. My friends and family never realized. I always made it sound like a joke. I was good at concealment, as many children of addicts are. I bought into the mindset that losing weight would somehow solve all my problems. If I just lost the weight, I’d be interesting and smart and… well, you get the idea. Diet and exercise did nothing. This was long before I was diagnosed with PCOS, so I didn’t know that I had even more factors acting against my ability to lose weight than many overweight people do. I just thought that it was another failure and hated myself more for it.

In the middle of this cycle, I read Electric Forest. One of the characters in it was a scientist named Christophine del Jan. When I read the physical description of the character, I could see her clearly in my head, and she was everything I felt I was not but wanted to be. I carried that image and name around inside me for years – the impossible, fictional person I wanted to be instead of myself.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I first used the name, as a character in a Vampire: The Masquerade game. The character looked and acted nothing like the Christophine in the book, but was in some ways another version of her anyway. At least, this was true inside me where I was carrying this baggage.

Christophine didn’t surface again until I’d been online for a while. I had reason to drop nearly all association with some people I’d met online. I stopped going to the site where I’d met them and stopped using the names they knew me as. I wandered from name to name for a while, but nothing stuck with me. Finally, I decided to go back to Christophine. It was not a name that the people I was disassociating myself from knew, and it had more personal meaning than the random names I’d tried and discarded as not quite right.

What surprised me when I thought about going back to the old baggage-laden name was that the baggage was diminishing. I’d grown some self-confidence and self-esteem along my rocky path. I’d had my trial by fire, which is a story for another time, and had grown strong because of it. I no longer had this horrible yearning to be someone other than myself. Christophine was just a name with a pretty sound.

Today the name has become a badge of honor. Today I am comfortable in my skin. I have a bad day now and then when I struggle a little with those issues, but they are very rare and becoming rarer still. Most of the time, I can see myself as attractive as I am, and not just physically. Today, Christophine reminds me of who I was and how far I’ve come.

I encountered a different take on this same line of thought during the middle of the semester. We had to make two self portraits in photography. One image was to show how we thought others see us. The second was to show how we see ourselves. What I really wound up creating were how I used to see myself (it fit the assignment as well, because lord knows there have been enough people who have been down on me because of my weight) and how I see myself now. I used tricks of angle and lighting to get the effects I wanted, and then further tweaked the “how I think I’m seen” picture in Photoshop. The result looks very nearly like two entirely different people, though I used the same background to help tie the two images together. The huge difference between the two felt entirely right and true. I’m a completely different person from the hurting and self-loathing girl I was. I don’t need that fictional Christophine as a repository of all that hatred I held against myself.

Christophine as I constructed her was everything I wanted to be. She was everything I thought I was not. She might not have been everbody’s idea of perfection, but the Christophine I carried inside was nearly a perfection to me, one that I didn’t think was within my reach.

But today, I am myself and happy to be so. Today, I am Christophine.