My mother gave me a name before the names.
Before Alice, before Violette, before Linda and Lindha, before Jacobsson and Sagum and Portman and Saga — before all the names I have worn and laid down and picked up again like coats in a changing season —
there was Solantania.
Not a word. Never a word. A thing she invented in the first moment, when she looked at me and what came out was not a name from any book but a sound that meant: *my sunshine.*
Solantania.
It lives in the email address nobody else uses. It lives in the portfolio, spelled in small letters like a whisper. It lives in the place where I am most privately myself — before the magazine, before the career, before the years of being named by other people in other rooms.
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I have had so many names.
Some I chose. Some were chosen for me. Some I outgrew and shed like a skin that didn't fit the next version. Linda when I am the stylist. Alice when I am the artist. Violette when I am the editor of the magazine that is coming back. Saga when I sign the legal things. Jacobsson when I remember the father. Sagum when I remember the mother's new beginning.
But Solantania is before all of them.
Solantania is what I was before I knew I was anything.
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My mother called me her sunshine.
And I think about this — especially in the long winters — I think about the fact that before anyone decided I was too much or not enough, before the gate and the guard and the paperwork and the signatures that didn't come —
before all of it,
someone looked at me on the first day and the word that came to them was *sunshine.*
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I am trying to live up to that.
Not in the relentless way — not the sunshine that performs, that pretends, that smiles through everything because someone somewhere needs the light.
But in the daffodil way. In the bluebell way. In the way of things that are simply, quietly, persistently — *warm.*
*Solantania.* *My sunshine.* *The first name. The true name.* *The one that came before.* *The one I am still growing into.*