a Name is a Name is a Name

a Name is a Name is a Name

While this blog isn't exactly brand new, it is, new to a new routine, of me posting weekly.

I can imagine my mom and my sisters and my aunts and my friends reading my blog. “Oh honey, you’re doing great.” I don’t imagine strangers reading it, until I do, until I realize I’m sharing my inner world with people I don’t know, and I have to say, I don’t like it. Rather, I don’t feel comfortable doing it, sharing me.

But there’s this world inside that’s been brewing for over five years now, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to combust if I don’t start giving it life. The characters in this world have become as real to me as the feelings I experience when I build them. We are friends by now. I miss them when my mind doesn’t find the time for them, when this thing called real life takes over, again. I try to reel back from it, from the reality of daily living, in and out like the breaths we can’t help but take, but I can’t breathe when they aren’t. They depend on me.

I’m working on fiction for the first time, but need to sharpen my writing and world-building skills so I can do these characters some justice. They’re quirky and cool and I want to make sure I give them the space they deserve. In so doing, I’m practicing, and exploring, and creating, and imagining, and doing all I can to help. But what good are they if they don’t have readers to live through them? I can write them into existence, but their survival isn’t just on me.

Build an audience is what I have read and realized.

How do you do that? Well, because I like to do things my way, I’m leaning on a Q&A format once a week for 52 weeks, based off questions I gathered from Pinterest. Get-to-know-me questions, to help you, the all-important readers, understand where the hell I came from and how my life maybe shaped these characters I sure hope you decide to get to know through my mind's eye, my perception and ultimately, my words.

So here goes...

QUESTION 1: WHERE DID YOUR NAME COME FROM?

This blog, Dakota Soulshine, resulted from lots of deep thinking while driving, while crying, while begging for more purpose, while days of wanting to hide were saved by the constant craving of words on page, mostly mine at that time, trying to figure out what was happening in my head. Okay fine, even I am vulnerable to a mid-life crisis which I'd like to revise and call a mid-life review.

However, of my birth name, Chasity Wilde, I had no say. My grandpa told his daughter that her daughter would never have any friends with a name like that, haha, love you Grandpa! As you know, I am beyond blessed. I can still see you sitting in your chairs, and those hands… Hugs to heaven.

I arm wrestled a huge biker named Tiny for a Sharpie to write my name in the Dungeon bar during a Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the early 90's. This pic was taken eight years ago, but last year I couldn't find me under all the dollars.

Dad liked to buy television sets he couldn’t afford, and Mom fell in love with actors she’d never meet. I feel related to soap opera characters that set the scene of my childhood. As did game shows, sitcoms, movies, PBS and prime time delights. My mother loved actors and actresses alike, or maybe it was their role in a world she neither knew nor desired. She just liked to watch them from her comfortable rural Midwestern living room. She learned from them. She learned new names beyond those of her cousins and sisters and single-digit classmates.

My brother was named after a handsome doctor on a soap opera. I was named after Sonny and Cher’s then five-year-old Chastity, but my mom didn’t like that extra “t” so she took it out. Rebel. Two sisters followed me, each named after sitcom characters.

Quite often, people don’t notice the missing “t” and call me Chastity anyway, or sometimes that's the only way they can enunciate, it’s weird. Other times it's with purposeful gusto, Chas-TIT-y, hello high school. People mistake me for a Charity, even a Christy, and when the name Jesse is said, I always turn my head.

When I was 12 or 13, I spun my brother’s puke green compact piece of shit car around a gravel road corner, landing in the neighbor’s ditch where his new pickup happened to be parked, and hit. I deserved the nickname Crashity after that, resurfaced a couple years later after another ding while whipping shitties in the dunes behind the town park.

East Coast Influence

Chesty came from the Asian print shop I often collaborated with while working at a New York City socialite magazine, pronounced over the phone and spelled out just so in each fax and email no matter my efforts to claim my truth. “To: Chesty”

Considering my ample bosom, I had to laugh how that had never been brought to the table as a nickname before, especially in college where beer calories inflated my boobs, or when I was pregnant and each breast's circumference surpassed my head.

Rather, my name caught attention as the oxymoron it almost was if you followed the definition with the extra “t”. Purity, haha, yep, that’s me . . .

Not.

With a last name like Wilde, I decided to obey, twist my arm. Have fun, you say? Okay Don’t be afraid to get crazy, you say? Okay. Do as you want not as your told? Oka... or maybe you weren’t told? Whatever. Okay.

Chaz began at that same magazine when I heard my editor belt it from her office one day, and I replied, “Yep? I mean, yes, Ms. Julie?”

“Chaz, be a doll and call this person back, I just can’t deal. Oh my gawd, is that skirt Burberry?”

“Uhmm, I don’t, know what, that is. I got it at Maurices, on sale.”

Pretty sure I didn’t live up to the expectation she assigned to how much she enjoyed rolling that "z" across her tongue until I could reach her office quickly enough. But, new true friends resurrected Chaz with love and so now I love it too.

I also worked at a recruiting agency in NYC with a room full of characters from every city, state, country – what a blast we had. There, Chasafrass and Chassy McChassersons sang from the mouth of a coworker turned friend who received a nickname back, definitely not as endearing as she deserved but too fun sometimes to be mature. Last names can be a bitch ;)

Chasilicious came from a bartender at a restaurant in Hoboken, NJ. I welcomed its ringtone when I walked in to waitress on evenings and weekends. A few years ago, while entering info online for a Rock ‘n Roll run in Arizona with my friend turning 40, I let the wine I was drinking dictate my application answers, and to my surprise when I opened a package in the mail a few days later to read “Chasilicious” on my running bib, ha!

I’ve been called other things, but maybe those stories are meant for another time . . .

Question 1, done.

Preview, Question 2: WHEN & WHERE WAS I BORN?

Nicknames are fun, share yours!