I’ve grown quite accustomed to being just another face in the crowd. There’s part of me that really digs that kind of anonymity. I didn’t try for it; it just came naturally. There’s nothing particularly spectacular about me. I don’t stand out (since I stopped coloring my hair like I belonged in a package of Skittles). I’m not very memorable. In fact, most people don’t even remember or know my name. Around my little town I’m most easily identified as “Haws’s daughter” or “Lindsay’s sister” (the exception being Wal-Mart, where I’m a rock star, but that’s a different blog post).
So it’s really weird for me to think that I’m the only person in the country with my name.
According to How Many of Me, I’m it. Based on their math and taking into account the spelling of my first name and the spelling of my last name, one person or less has my name. As a fat girl, I certainly don’t qualify as less, so I must be the ONE.
What’s funny about this is that it wasn’t what my mother was striving for when she named me. Yes, she didn’t take popularity into account in the sense that she didn’t want me to have the same name as six other girls in my class (sorry, Jennifers). Christin was actually not her first choice; Carrie was. But when her roommate in the hospital named her baby Carrie, Mom went with the Christin. And the spelling wasn’t intentionally unique. Mom just thought that’s how it was supposed to be spelled…Chris-tin. Way to go, Hooked on Phonics. But my mom wasn’t the only one. Over 11,000 people have their name spelled the same way. I’ve met four of them.
And my last name, well…it is what it is. There’s only about 4,000 people with this last name with this spelling in the country, according to the website. I can’t help that.
But it’s the combination of the two is that really puts my name in the unique category. I am it.
WordPress stats are handy because they tell me what searches people do to find my blog. People get here a lot of ways, some of them very strange. But nothing grabs my attention quite like my name popping up in the search terms.
When you Google my name, first it will ask if you meant someone else (Christian or Christine Haws is usually pretty popular). Then the first five entries will be all about me. My Twitter, my blog, an old website, a blog guest post, my Smashwords page. Then the other names start to filter in.
Here’s the thing. If I’m the only one with my name and the people doing the searching spelled everything right, then that means people who come to my blog searching my name are looking for ME. When you go through life largely ignored, it’s bizarre to think someone Googled you.
Sometimes I think it’s a little creepy, but then I’m also prone to paranoia.
Granted, I imagine most of those hits are people who know me who can’t remember my blog name or haven’t bookmarked it or aren’t following it (that’s right, you feel shame about not bookmarking me). But odds are at least one of those searches was done by a stranger.
It’s a concept that’s kind of difficult for me to grasp.
But then, I’m strange like that.
It comes with being the one and only me.
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