Many of you know me as Tessa Rae. However, I was not born with this name. The decision to change my name was one I thought about for many years before I finally made the plunge.
Born under the name Tessa Wray, I grew up quietly, and for most of my life I would go out of my way to avoid situations that would call attention to myself. Most of my life has been spent quietly in a shell.... In fact, I feel that learning how to express myself is a big part of my soul’s journey here on earth.
This fear had its grip on myself and my actions for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally gained enough courage to start breaking out of the mold that my parents, church, and even friends, had compartmentalized me into. In all truth, I began to break out of the mold that I had put myself into.
Challenging paradigms rarely happens without consequences. Many of us are resistant to change because we fear what those changes could mean. We oftentimes think those changes are for the worse, and fear the permanency of change.
But change is just that. If there were to be any overarching law of this universe, it is change. No matter how permanent things may seem, they aren’t.
I have not spoken much about it, but many of you know that my father has abusive tendencies towards me. This actually played a big role in my decision to change my name.
It wasn’t until Middle School that depression began to flood my reality. It started out slowly, like a leak in the roof, until one day I realized I was submerged. I had no words for it at the time… all I knew was a numbness that started to eat away at my self esteem somehow became the new normal, that carried on all the way to my junior year of high school.
One day after school in my junior year, I found myself smoking marijuana with some friends I had just made. From my perspective, these friends were much more accepting and open than anyone else I had ever met in my entire life. Contrary to the religious friends that I had often been surrounded by growing up, none of them seemed to care about being ‘weird'. Though it was a small thing, that day turned out to be a turning point in my life for both better and worse; That day, I realized that the judgement had to stop within myself… and also that same day, was the end of a peaceful home life.
My parents actually found out I had smoked pot the very first time I tried it, and so I actually never got a phase of peace where I could enjoy the spiritual shift that had taken place within me. Instead, I was thrust right into what I now look back as being some of the darkest times in my life. If they had known that I had only smoked pot to feel better, perhaps things would have been different.
I feel it was a combination of finding my own path and thus making changes within myself, and fear, that brought out the abusive side of my father full throttle. There had been glimpses scattered throughout my childhood, but it was not until I was around age 16 that his behavior became more extreme, morphing into what I now recognize as overt abusive behavior.
Every day, I didn’t know what to expect; there was no way to tell. Some days my father would be okay and let me by with neglect, other days he would become violent and hit, yell, or berate me. He would sometimes cuss me out, then afterwards he would tell me that crying was childish and treat me like I was incapable of doing anything with my life. Oftentimes he would isolate me, so when I would tell other people of the unspeakable, he would be able to talk his way out of it, downplaying my own experience and oftentimes flat out lying about the actual events that took place so that touching upon any sort of truth became impossible.
Spiritually, this lead to a bizarre time in my life. Not surprisingly, I became even more depressed! My grades started falling as my home life became more and more unstable. It was a horrible cycle that began, where my success oriented father would become verbally and physically abusive because my grades were failing, which caused me to do worse, which caused him to be more abusive…
I felt I had nowhere to go, and no future ahead of me. Watching my father sit in church on Sundays made my blood burn. How could such hypocrisy exist in a person?
I would speak about what happened to people close to me, and they would be the only ones to know about the horrors that happened behind closed doors. Most people who knew my father publically I would not trust to confide in, as many of them simply weren’t aware of how bad it actually was when I would find myself alone with him.
Other people in my family were afraid of him when he would target me. I was desperate for help but I was the only one who was willing to stand up against him. This often lead to things getting worse. One time I called the police as I was in the middle of an anxiety attack, as my dad chased me through the house screaming at me. You can imagine my shock when the policeman told my whole family in a jaded tone, that my father “could do whatever he wanted with me, because I was his daughter.”
What does this have to do with my name, you ask?
Well, it was around age 16 when I first had the desire to have a different last name. I never liked how having the same last name seemed to tie us together, and at times I felt my father would treat me like I was an object that he owned, and as the police had said, could do whatever he wanted with me. I felt that changing my last name would be one final way to destroy the illusion that he held of me, whatever that illusion looked like. Because it was clear as time passed, that I was not the person he was trying to make me become.
It took five years of having minimal contact for me to realize he wasn’t going to change.
The dynamics of our relationship consisted of glimpses of normalcy, interlaced with very deep hurts, and no retribution. My father used lying and denying the past as a sort of apology, and in fact my father would only apologize if other people, usually my mom, pushed him to. Usually, he would say I was “crazy” for “remembering things wrong”, and would often shame me for having boundaries, feelings, or individuality at all. I was often apologizing for things I wasn’t even sorry for, and he was angry at me for doing things that had nothing to do with him at all.
When I was 17, I had my first spiritual awakening experience on a warm night in April. It was on that night when I realized that I had the power of focus, and I could in fact choose how I look at the various experiences that happen to me. I also realized that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves, pieces in a mosaic.
At the time, I had been angry with God and was doubting whether or not a god even exists. I told myself, if he does exist, such a ‘God’ could not be benevolent. That night, I suddenly saw myself where I was; I had been depressed. I saw that not only is God alive and benevolent, but we are we all in conversation with this God. I understood that my soul had chosen to come into my particular life for a reason, even though I couldn’t see those reasons from my temporal perspective. Though it took time for others to notice, my life was changed forever that day, and a shift had taken place within me, for the better.
While I was still depressed, I was given the tools needed to move my way out of it.
Later on that year, I found out my father was cheating on my mother. I found the phone myself when I was going to the bathroom and wanted to play a game my dad had on his phone. When I pulled out the phone, it was not my dad’s usual phone but instead a small prepaid phone; his mom was one contact, and the other contact I didn’t know. I decided to call the number and heard some girly voice on the other end pick up, saying in a flirty voice, “I can’t hear you…”
Apparently, finding out my dad was cheating on my mom was a shock to everyone else. It wasn’t that way for me. I had already known my dad lived a double life, and finding out he was cheating made me realize he had been taking out all the anger he had at himself, out on me.
I kept quiet about it still, following my best friend’s wise advice to stay quiet unless my mom said something about it, or unless my dad was going to go through with moving our whole family out of the state (something he was considering at the time).
It all happened so fast. I remember it in glimpses, snapshots… my friend Laura and I staying after school to work on art every day… eventually telling my brothers what I had found… My parents finding out about my brothers’ marijuana use… Meeting my first love, Miles… and I remember sitting with mom outside the grocery store parking lot in February, as she asked me if my dad was cheating on her. As the Valentine’s day decorations towered in sickeningly gaudy shades of pink and red, we found the phone he had been trying so hard to hide, and all bets were off.
I was no longer the sole target of my dad’s wrath. At this point, we had all been a target, save for my youngest brother, who was pinned the role of Golden Child. By this time I was absolutely certain that I had no desire to be tied to my father through sharing a last name, but I was not sure what I wanted to change it to. I thought to myself humorously, that at this point I would end up getting married to someone for the sole purpose of changing my last name (which was obviously a horrible idea, though funny to daydream about).
Meanwhile, I find myself on a contemplative path, no matter where I go. I have no doubts in my soul that we are in a constant communion with the divine, and no matter where I go I am in conversation with the universe, Source, God. We all are; it’s just a matter of listening, of discernment.
My father’s abuse is simply the shadow of why I chose to change my name… On the other side, is the light of conscious creation. For me, a change of name is a symbol of being reborn, a symbol of spiritual transformation and renewal, and an opportunity to bring myself full circle, after losing myself so many times before.
Many people who are close to me have said that I have changed in recent years. And while I have thought of these not as changes but rather, “becoming”, I understand that in many ways I have changed, and am not the same person that I was five years ago when I first awakened.
Like I touched upon earlier, the seed was planted many years ago, and has simply grown with the passage of time. I don’t want this post to mislead you into thinking that spirituality is an automatic key into sainthood, because it’s not. I would give anything to change some of the decisions I have made in the past, and I hope to talk about some of these decisions in future blog posts. I have found that sometimes losing ourselves can be an integral part of finding ourselves, though taking such a road is not an easy one...
Though subtle, I chose to change my name from Tessa Wray to Tessa Rae.
Although my name is not spelled the exact same way, a tesserae is actually an art term that is used to describe a piece that makes up a mosaic.
The older I have grown, the more I have realized how beautiful of a description that is… We are all pieces in the mosaic of humankind, all individual snapshots of the collective work of art that is life itself.
When looking at a mosaic, one does not see one piece and declare it lesser compared to another piece. But when we look at other people we inflict this judgement all the time. It is time to realize that we are all souls having a human experience, and that we are all on different journeys, all of them beautiful and unique in their own way. It is time to end the old paradigm of “eat or be eaten”, the old paradigm of survival of the fittest.
We are all in the same boat, and fighting each other does not stop the ship from sinking!
We think that we know what it is like to be another person. We like to think that if we were in the shoes of another person, we would be different. But in telling ourselves this, we fail to honor the divine in every individual. We fail to see that we are all different and have different ways of learning, and that we all do the best we can with the knowledge that we currently have.
After experiencing my second spiritual awakening, I have committed to my decision. Fears of being called crazy, of calling attention to myself, and of caring what other people think, I leave behind as I move forward with my decision. And in doing so, I hope to awaken others to the power we do have to change what we can.
So often I see people doing things because they feel like they “have to” or “should”, and do these things at the expense of their own well being. I am here today to tell you that you are not doing anyone a favor by feeding into this illusion of “should”. There is no one right way of doing the dishes. And our lives, are no different. It’s time to embrace our very essence as creators, and begin to use the tools we do have, to create the sort of lives we most desire.
Nobody else can make that decision for you. And as hard as it can be to see at times, nobody can take that power away from you. It is always yours to have.
You are beautiful and unique. I wish you all a lovely week.
Stay Strong.
~Tessa Rae
