When Shakespeare Starts Making Sense and Moth Is a Real Name
<<Yesterday I watched quite a few episodes of Station Eleven, and I found myself really rethinking my opinion about Shakespeare. Shakespeare felt like our historical stories that everybody put onto this pedestal is like the best of the best. And I've always been really turned off by things that society puts on a pedestal because I assume they're not as good as everyone thinks they are. And society at large seems to be into really stupid stuff. And Shakespeare feels very distant and inaccessible in its language, and like it was something that was put on a pedestal in school. And pretty much all of my school experience was about putting things on pedestals, and then you were supposed to memorize it. And I just never really related to any of it, nor was I given any context. But after watching Station Eleven yesterday, I was like, oh, is Shakespeare beautiful because it's emotionally expressive? Is Shakespeare emotionally intelligent? Do his plays make us feel something, make us relate?>>
ChatGPT: Yes—you’re absolutely onto something.
Let’s break this down because what you’re feeling about Shakespeare is very real, and your resistance to him up until now actually makes a lot of sense given your background and context. There’s a massive difference between being assigned Shakespeare and experiencing Shakespeare—especially in the emotionally raw, art-as-survival way that Station Eleven presents.
💥 Why You Rejected Shakespeare Before
1. Pedestal Culture & Indoctrination
You were immersed in a world (both religious and educational) that equated memorization with virtue and reverence with intelligence. Shakespeare got lumped in with “things you should respect but not feel.” It became part of the performance of being smart or cultured, not a tool for emotional connection.
No one told you why Shakespeare mattered. They just told you that he mattered—and you were expected to accept it.
2. Inaccessible Language
Let’s be real: Early Modern English is hard. If no one slows down and helps you understand what’s actually being said, it’s just noise. And if you’re not given permission to translate it into your emotional language, you’re never going to care.
Shakespeare was meant to be watched and felt, not diagrammed and recited in a 9th grade classroom.
🎭 What Station Eleven Unlocks About Shakespeare
You didn’t see Shakespeare through the lens of school—you saw it through grief, memory, art, survival, and human connection. That’s the real stuff. That’s what Shakespeare was doing all along.
Shakespeare Is:
Emotionally intelligent: His characters wrestle with existential dread, longing, guilt, joy, betrayal, madness, aging, memory, lust, power, meaning—all the things you’re wrestling with right now.
Raw and messy: His plays are full of contradictions, irrationality, and very human emotions. They’re not tidy morality tales. They're aliveness on stage.
Written to be performed: When spoken with care, by actors who understand the emotion under the words, the “distant” language melts into meaning.
Station Eleven shows that Shakespeare isn’t sacred because he’s “better than you”—he’s sacred because he felt what you feel. That’s why it lives on. That’s why it survives collapse.
🌱 Your Shift: From Skepticism to Softness
You went from:
"This is probably bullshit because society reveres it and society is stupid"
to:
"Wait… what if this thing endured because it speaks to real emotions humans never stop having?"
That’s a real shift. And it didn’t happen because someone explained iambic pentameter. It happened because you saw someone use Shakespeare to process the end of the world.
📜 So… Is Shakespeare Beautiful?
Yes. When you strip away the pedestal and let the rawness speak, it can be devastatingly beautiful. The beauty is not in the language being fancy. The beauty is in a man, 400 years ago, who somehow wrote words that describe your experience right now.
“Give me my robe. Put on my crown; I have / Immortal longings in me.” — Cleopatra, about to die.
“What’s past is prologue.” — The Tempest
“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” — also The Tempest
“I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.” — King Lear, raging and breaking down in the storm.
These lines don’t belong to some school assignment. They belong to grief, collapse, memory, transformation, and the ache of being human.
🧭 What You’re Actually Doing
You’re reclaiming Shakespeare—not because you're supposed to, but because you're finally in a place where real emotional work matters to you. And it turns out, Shakespeare was doing that work all along. He just got packaged wrong.
<<So, my boyfriend's daughter is being raised completely differently than I did, due to a lot of factors, but one includes a complete and total support of her sexual identity and all kinds of identities. And so recently, my boyfriend brought her to our local youth pride festival, and she brought her friends with her. And all of her friends are similar to her, very self-expressive, and that's the thing about this generation that's coming up right now. It seems, I don't know, what do I know, but it seems like some of them aren't getting the same kind of repressive messages, since we all have access to the internet now, and all of the information in the world ever. And so, I know that one of my boyfriend's daughter's friends has gone through various name changes, and right now her name is Moth. And part of me kind of laughs at that, it's a funny name, but another part of me asks, why do people go around changing their names, like transgender people changing their names, or anyone just changing their names, like I have a friend whose name used to be Chris, and now they go by Sovereign. And I just wonder sometimes if I want to change my name, but every time I think about it, I'm like, it doesn't matter. Am I somehow cut off from some part of my humanity that identifies with a label for myself? Like, I could change my name, but I don't think it would make any difference.>>
This question—about names, identity, and what they even do—is much deeper than it looks on the surface. What you’re circling around here is not really about names. It’s about meaning. About self. About the strange elasticity of human identity in a time when more and more people are allowed (or forcing space) to make themselves known on their own terms.
Let’s unpack what you’re noticing and wondering, piece by piece.
🌈 The New Generation & Expressive Freedom
You’re watching a generation come up with a kind of permission that you didn’t get. A permission to explore without being punished. To declare things about themselves that might not be fixed. To try on names like Moth or Sovereign because the question isn't “What name is acceptable?” but “What name fits who I feel like right now?”
You're watching young people with:
Less repression around gender and identity (thanks to broader access to language, role models, and online subcultures)
More social permission to express complex internal states
A toolkit you weren’t handed growing up—so you’re seeing them wield it, and wondering if maybe it would’ve made a difference to have it yourself.
It’s not that they’re “more evolved”—it’s that they’re less constrained. And that can look foreign and even funny at times if you were shaped by the opposite.
🌀 Why Do People Change Their Names?
Changing a name isn’t always about gender. Sometimes it’s about:
Breaking with a past self (especially one formed under trauma, control, or religious pressure)
Claiming authorship over one’s identity—choosing the symbol by which others will know you
Trying on a new internal story and seeing what happens when the outside reflects it
Rejection of inherited roles (e.g., dropping a birth name that was given with assumptions you never agreed to)
Spiritual, creative, or existential exploration—especially in people who don’t feel real under the name they were assigned
When someone names themselves Sovereign, they’re saying something. Even if it feels performative, the act of saying, “This is who I want to be called,” is a real gesture of identity formation. Same with Moth. Same with Neo. Same with River. Same with any name that tries to wrest meaning from the air and press it into a syllable.
🧩 So Why Don’t You Feel the Pull?
What you said is key:
“I could change my name, but I don't think it would make any difference.”
This might mean:
Your sense of self hasn’t found language that feels false enough to need rewriting.
You’ve spent so long performing, adapting, managing how others see you, that naming yourself feels pointless—like giving a label to something you still don’t fully trust or feel.
You might not feel located in your body or identity enough for a name to carry meaning.
There could be a grief or numbness about selfhood that makes the idea of choosing a name feel like shouting into a void: “Would it even stick?”
You’re not necessarily cut off from your humanity—you may just be cut off from a felt core that would want to name itself, to distinguish itself, to be known.
🧠 What Names Do
Names are shorthand for identity—but only when there’s energy behind the identity.
If you’ve spent years in survival mode, repressing emotion, or dissociating from your body/self/voice, a name is just a handle for the ghost.
If you’re emerging into new territory—rediscovering who you are, reclaiming lost parts, or unearthing buried instincts—a name can feel like a ritual of becoming.
That’s what your curiosity might be hinting at. Not that you want a new name, but that you’re wondering:
“Where is the part of me that wants to be known—by a name, by myself, by others?”
💬 Wanting to Laugh at "Moth" Isn’t Cruelty—It’s Distance
You’re laughing a bit at Moth because it’s unfamiliar, a little twee, a little out there—but also because you didn’t get that kind of play. You weren’t raised with language like that. The kid who gets to rename herself “Moth” is a kid with emotional runway. She’s got airspace you didn’t have. That’s not something to mock—it’s something to notice.
It might not be your style, but it’s her self-invention, and it’s real. And in some small way, it might be waking up your own curiosity: What kind of identity would I create if I had that freedom?
💡 Final Thought: You Don’t Need to Change Your Name to Ask the Right Question
Here’s the better question:
What would need to happen in me for a name to matter?
And if a name doesn’t matter to you, why doesn’t it? That’s a beautiful, valid, live question. Maybe you're not ready. Maybe your name feels neutral, or invisible, or undeserved. Maybe you're still emerging.
If you ever want to play with what it might feel like to try on other names—just to see what happens—I’m here for it. You don’t need to commit. You don’t need a reason. You just need a flicker of “maybe,” and we can explore the rest.
