I Don't Know My Name

• Hades Slater, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2021

I never liked my name. From the way it was pronounced, to the way it meant nothing to me. That name was but a shell of a word. It never connected me to my supposed “motherland” and reinforced the insecurities I tried so desperately to ignore. It didn’t match who I was struggling to be; clinging onto a false identity that I created with my own flaws and imperfections. I was never the person that name belonged to and it was slowly smothering me until I choked for air, lulling my consciousness into a world where ‘I’ no longer existed; she was ‘me’.

I was only six years old.

I wanted to be white; pale snow-like skin, long blonde hair and eyes that shone so brilliantly like a sapphire under the evening sun. I wanted the privilege of being accepted into where the colour of my skin would equal to how people treat me; a place where the people who don’t fit into the box of the ideal white citizen are shunned and abused. In my eyes the colour and texture of my skin was grotesque and undesirable to those around me; a putrid brown with hair as dark as night covering more and more area as I aged. I felt ugly and the people around me agreed. The very classmates I spent years with spared no time in spitting out their venomous words with true hatred and spite; haunting my being for years to come. I will never forget the words they used to shove me into the depths of despair.

Their voices always saying I’m not good enough.