Monitor Me

A lot of people come to my site because they search for my name. Every now and then I even get a comment from some other person named Rilla, and so I'm led to believe that there are more of us out there who are interested in ourselves.

What was it like for this Rilla to have the name Rilla? Let's see what I can come up with.

1) I was named Rilla because my mom loved the book Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery. I read the whole Anne of Green Gables series before I was ten, likely prompted by the desire to get to the final book and gain some insight into my own nature. I mean, if I was named for that character, I must have something in common with her, right? Not really.

I don't lisp. I don't have a baby I brought home in a soup tourreen. I didn't fall in love with a soldier.

However, a boy from my church who had a crush on me once said to me, "Rilla my Rilla?" which is the ultimate pick up line from the book, and I blushed and ran away. Also, I had a very bizarre vocabulary for a child growing up in the early 80's. I once told my parents that my classmate was apoplectic, and they thought I was the funniest girl in the world. I was being serious. He had seizures. It was quite traumatic.

2) Without fail, every time I did anything athletic in public, someone would unwittingly yell, "Go Rilla!" and then realize that it sounded like gorilla and they would think it was the most brilliant joke ever. Holy Crap! There are not a lot of ways you can make Rilla into a nickname, so gorilla was always the most popular one. Usually its somewhat spontaneous discovery meant that it was assumed to be really very funny because they hadn't thought of it. Once someone figured it out, it stuck. And I hated it.

I quickly learned to avoid sports. Well, that's not entirely true. I don't really like sports anyway, so avoiding them wasn't really that hard. It was in my nature.

I have accepted the nickname gorilla and, like most things in life, once you figure out how to get over the little things, the little things kind of disappear. So, having survived my youth, there are much fewer opportunites for the "Go Rilla!" phenomena to pop up.

My name has been truncated to "La" and "Ril" and for one summer I was called "Rilly" which I'm quite relieved only lasted one summer. For now I seem to be going by the whole thing. Oh, and No. My "full" name is not Marilla. Yes. I'm sure.

3) I was always super annoyed that all of the gimmicky pens, t-shirts, license plates, etc. that showcased people's names, never had mine. I know, it's an uncommon name, uncommon enough that you're searching the internet to find other people who share your name, but I really thought it was unreasonable that I couldn't have a pen with my name on it. My parents got tired of hearing me complain about it and one year they paid somebody to make me a little pin (not PEN, pin, as in broach) made of gold that had my name in script. I never wore it because I wasn't an eighty year old woman, but I did put it in my special keepsake box and I took it out and looked at it almost every day until I got old enough to feel embarrassed about gifts from my parents.

4) For a while the uncommon nature of my name was a little embarrassing to me. I was a pretty sensitive kid and I got frustrated that nobody knew what my name was. Every time I introduced myself to someone new I would have to spell my name and then, if it was a kid, suffer through a bit of teasing, and if it was an adult, live through the oh-what-an-unusual-names. Unusual is like the kiss of death in elementary school, so I kind of had a hard time of it for a while.

My mom wrote me a book, had a family friend illustrate it, and then had it laminated properly and gave it to me for Christmas one year. It was all about how my name was unusual and that it was kind of a hard thing for me to deal with, but that unusual can also be beautiful and creative. Unique.

So, I've kind of wrapped that idea of being "unique" around me like a big comforting blanket for most of my life. When the internet started to really grow into a place where people started to put information about themselves online, I did a few searches for other Rillas. It was back in the nineties, and so the internet was still a bit difficult to navigate, but I found one from New Zealand. We e-mailed back and forth for a while, but since we only had our names in common, we didn't really grow as friends. But back to being "unique." It was a bit of an awakening for me because I had assumed that I wouldn't find any other Rillas out there. But I did. I was excited, initially, but the more I thought about the existence of this OTHER RILLA, I kind of felt like I was less special. I was no longer unique at all. Now there's a lot more of us on here, and while I haven't met one face to face yet, the day will likely come.

It didn't take me too long to get over the feeling that I was somehow less special because there are more of me out there. Now I'm always a little excited when another Rilla shows up. I hope you say, "Hello."