It's all in the Name

Something incredible happened to me today. So that you may understand the magnitude of this I'm going to use the example of Christopher McCandless, the protagonist of Into The Wild who after graduation destroys every shred of ID given to him by the establishment; gives away his college fund to Oxfam and sets off into the wild, an aesthetic voyager, to experience nature firsthand and to explore his own interior landscape. At the same time he aggressively rejects all conventional life reference points like love, family, achievement and responsibility.

Heroic adventurer, naive idealist or just emotionally immature - it's up to you to decide. What's relevant to me is that he felt alone, outside of the system and chose to protest against it by ridding himself of every connection to things that defined him in the secular and religious sphere. While I was never that radical, I became a bit rebellious when I lost my parents 15 years ago. Having no brothers or sisters when this happened, I basically lost everything that kept me tethered to the material world. My way of dealing with this was to subconsciously build my defenses. Pomposity was one of them, arrogance another and the total disdain for other people's activities and ceremonies. Without a family what did ritual matter? So I stood alone and aloof with just a select clique of people around me.

Much of that changed when I eventually married and had a child. I made my own unconditional love tree. My husband's family will tell you I like nothing more than to sit around the Christmas tree with everyone milling about making noise, reaffirming my secure hearth - the one I didn't want to admit I missed and wanted again. This is what happens to Christopher in the film - in the end he is proud to be his father's son.

Well, recently after I'd long ago accepted that with the death of my parents went the anchor to the extended family, (as they weren't in the same country as me) a cousin I never knew I had on my father's side found me on Facebook. He has the same surname as me. This is huge. It means I belong to someone and they belong to me, in nature - something that will never be taken from me. He then opened the floodgates to other aunts, uncles and cousins all of whom have the same blood in their veins as me. I exist as part of a whole that started long before me and will continue long after, again. I am.

Happy, confident, grateful and proud of my father's name once more.