About Me and About This Domain

My name is Sharonda Woodfin. For as long as I can remember—before that, actually, back to when I was just a few days old—I’ve been Sam. My mom loved the name "Sharonda". My dad, apparently, did not. He started calling me "Sam", and—with assistance from the path of least resistance—I became "Sam" to everyone around me, including the mother who named me "Sharonda" in the first place.

To make my formative identity process more complicated, the dad who gave me my nickname (which carried on after he couldn't) died when my age was still counted in months. All eight of them. When 30 of those months had accumulated, my mom and I moved away from Illinois and most of the Woodfin half of my family. I spent the rest of my growing up around my Warren half.

But wait! There are more than two halves! Two halves are for all you non-adopted folks. I’m not non-adopted. I have four halves, even if two of those halves (the biological halves, to be clear) were a bit late to start the integration process.

So, am I a Sam or a Sharonda? A Woodfin, a Warren, a Hilderbrand, or a Marks? Why do my mothers’ maiden names come into play, but not those of my mothers’ mothers or my fathers’ mothers? Let’s add Scisms and Coalsons and Kirkpatricks and Bantas to the mix! Just a little climb up my family copse leads to a heritage as solid and substantial as dandelion cypselae cruising on a spring breeze.

I don’t believe that being an adoptee guarantees an identity crisis. But I think it can cause one to see identity differently—more fluidly, more flexibly—than it is seen by people who were raised by their biological parents.

And how do I know how non-adoptees see identity? Y’all tend to talk about blood and family in ways that I never would. Some of the things that people say about family make the differences in our concepts hard to ignore.

And, at some weak points, those conceptual differences—that unboned flexibility; my gelatin to everyone else’s marrow—can start to feel like a crisis.

For me, this jiggling mound of identity crisis is topped with a garnish of the impostor syndrome due any flailing creative.^[1]

And this? What you’re reading now?

This is my long-winded way of justifying to you—and to the other Sam Woodfins out there; I know there are at least two of you—why, while having a perfectly unique legal name that doesn’t necessarily derive to “Sam”, I’m choosing to use my other name—the non-derivative derivative, the one I’m most comfortable with, the one I’ve been called by nearly everyone in my life (and certainly anyone who loved me)—as the name I am putting forward for myself, even while another is using it in a similar fashion.

If you’re looking for one of the other Sam Woodfins, maybe one of the Sams from Texas; maybe the DJ or the young artist... Well, that ain’t me. I’m not the Sam Woodfin who currently owns samwoodfin.com.

(I’d like to point out, however, that I owned that domain back in 2001. I'm willing to bet that I had it before anyone else did.)

I’m the Sam Woodfin from Missouri, who grew up in Stoddard County, who went to school (occasionally) in Bell City and Bloomfield, then moved on to Three Rivers Community College and Southeast Missouri State University, before heading to Southern California and settling in Anaheim.

I’m the Sam Woodfin who is a woman in her 50s; who is married to Linda Mah; who is obese, and diabetic, and hypothyroid, caffeine-fueled and anxiety-driven, and a long way from any of her families excepting those who became family only after 2010.

I’m the Sam Woodfin who owns samwoodfin.net.

I’m the Sam Woodfin who is reclaiming her identity, regardless of any crisis around it.

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