MEET KATYA
Name change, identity, ancestry, artistry, second-selfing, purging
Yes, I have done the crazy thing and moved to a new place and started using a new name.
I haven’t said anything anywhere about why I am now calling myself Katya. It’s actually been a deeply personal and tender journey, that I feel some awkwardness and shame about.
But I have long loved the doppelgänger. I have lusted for Lynchian and Murakami-ish encounters with twin and other, I have studied and researched the slipstream, I have been transformed by IFS therapy and the truth is I am made of many, many parts. So are you.
And there’s no way I could ever show you all of me. I can only show you pieces, parts.
My given name is Katy Lorraine Avila. I still love it. It is still me.
But in school, there were always so many Katy’s, Katie’s, etc. I was always Katy A. I hated that. It made me feel generic. And I didn’t feel like everyone else. I definitely wasn’t like everyone else - a very sensitive, introverted, emotional child, who very literally could never stop crying, and felt wildly broken inside.
I remember seeing a little girl in daycare once whose name was “Katya” and thinking, oh, that’s my name. That’s what I’ve been writing. It feels like that was the moment a piece of me split off into this identity.
I like that you don’t have to smile when you say “Katya” like you do for Katy. I want you to take me seriously. I kind of want you to be scared of me. I’m a little scared of me.
It’s also sexier. Katy is the “pet name” for Katherine. I am no pet. I am a beast. There is a deep retrieval happening with my sex and sexuality that I haven’t quite known how to share about. A deep reclamation of a part of myself that was exiled in childhood. The innocence of eros.
Katya feels like she holds a key here for me.
A few dear friends have been calling me Katya for years. The name was given to me by my dearest Russian poet friend, who also plays with the double-self, the multiple-selves. He knows the tension of the split personality that comes from being multicultural/racial, as a Soviet refugee that grew up in Toronto.
Again, who isn’t 1,000 different identities all mashed into one?
I tried to make my name an anagram of Katy Avila. Katya Vila. But my work mom, my manager at a restaurant in Oakland, knowing I was searching for a new name, suggested Villa. She said it sounded “big.”
In March, on the southernmost point of Mexico, my best friend and I sat on the beach together staring into the vast ocean and dark night sky, and she said a prayer that called me into my bigness this year.
Elongating my name feels like a literal way to do that. It turns out that Katya Villa is an anagram of Katy L. Avila. Just adding my middle initial into the puzzle. An extra L. Maybe this is inviting more love. More life.
Villa. Country estate. House. Town. Home.
All things I am looking for.
Wandering, traveling, with no place like home, for now
besides Brooklyn where I have decided to land for 3 months
There’s something about searching for belonging in this name, too.
I feel like Dorothy, looking for the people I can go over the rainbow with.
Family. A band of weirdos. My tin man, my scarecrow, my lion.
I am on an ancestral pilgrimage. My father’s side is Mexican, and when I visited the land for the first time a year and a half ago, I felt the ancestors ring a truth inside of my bones, saying it is time to pursue music. That they were in survival mode so that I didn’t have to be. That I needed to write the songs they never got to sing.
My connection to my Spanish/indigenous heritage is complex and complicated, but family legend has it that my ancestor (a great, great grandfather? It is unclear) fought in Pancho Villa’s army. His brother was murdered for being a part of the revolutionary army, which caused the family to flee to the states.
I didn’t realize until a couple days ago that the anagram of my name gave me the same surname as Pancho.
This is how ancestors speak to me.
I am reconnecting with New York partly because I have Polish ancestry that came here through Ellis Island. I have had visions of visiting my great grandmother’s grave in Rochester. I found it online already. It’s near a river. She died very young, in her 30’s. I’m planning to go soon.
It seems like this side of the family might have come through Russia. So Katya is a nod to my Eastern European side that I have never really connected with, besides through food. Placki. Pierogies. And being stereotyped as a little ditzy.
It’s a sensitive time to enliven my connection to this part of the world, this part of me, and the way it is burdened with war and violence. While I get to sit here in a coffee shop and muse about why I’m changing my name to an imaginary audience, others, probably named Katya or Katia, are experiencing a scorched earth. Same goes for the memory of war that I invoke with name Villa.
Perhaps it will help me remember my own darkness. My own capacity for evil. The war within myself. The inner opposition, tension.
This might be the farthest back that I can go in researching my ancestry. The rest of it gets erased by colonization, war, etc. I’m grateful I can go even this far, as some people don’t have that luxury of knowing where they came from at all. The violence is nearer in linear time.
There is no way to ever really know who we are, or where we come from.
However far we search, however far we look back, we research, we dig, we will always, inevitably arrive back at the mystery.
We are the unknown.
I am on an artistic pilgrimage. All of my favorite artists are from, or migrated to, or spent time, in New York.
Regina Spektor. John Lennon. Patti Smith. Gabrielle Roth. Musicians, writers, poets, dancers.
I like that Katya connects me to comrade Spektor too. Of all the artists, she may be my most influential. I also have a complicated and devoted relationship with Nabokov.
I first felt called to New York by Central Park. I felt the trees, the waters, call to me. I saw John Lennon’s memorial. “Imagine.” This song is the closest thing to a bible that I’ve ever known.
Just Kids by Patti Smith broke my heart with the longing to experience NY in the late 60s. I had no idea Gabrielle Roth did 5rhythms, a movement modality, in New York and that I can find a movement church any day of the week. I have also been binging Sex and the City and remembering my desire to be a writer like Carrie. And a goddess like Samantha.
My psyche, my imagination, has been calling me to New York my whole life. It’s my proverbial Mecca. My emerald city.
I’ve been told I’m “second-self”-ing.
I have done this before, separated out my identity, untangled the parts, written about myself and my life in the 3rd person. Made an anonymous IG account for my photography and poetry. Charlotte Bronte did this. Published under the name Currer Bell. A genderless layer of protection during a time that it was dangerous to write as a woman. Her sisters did it too, Acton, Ellis Bell. For a while I used to imagine a pen name for myself, Kannen Bell. To put me in the family of sisters.
When we create an alter ego, maybe it’s an altar ego? An energy, a force, an archetype that is wanting to move through us. It feels like this name came to me. This personality is flowing through me.
Artists choose to reinvent themselves because we are often moved to creation by the simple, and ceaseless asking of “who am I, now?”
A question with an answer that will never come. An endless exploration. A seeking. Led by an aching desire to know the mystery.
Katy will always be there for me if I need her.
But for now, I am Katya.
Katya Villa.
Cloaked in mystery.
Who is she?
A doppelgänger?
A spy?
A revolutionary general?
A madwoman? An artist, an ancestor?
A family? A community?
A collective?
A town?
A city?
The earth?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Katy/Katya/Katherine is Greek, and means “pure.” I think this explains why I have always felt deeply connected to Greek mythology and astrology - the sky, the stars, the moon.
But when I first found out this is what my name meant years ago, I hated it.
People always said my voice sounded “pure” or “clear” when I sang. It made sense, as I sang in choir for 10 years and was constantly warmed up. Good at blending in. This led to years of trying to rough up my voice with smoking.
But over the last year, my voice has changed. I went through a betrayal trauma and breakup which I have only been able to move through by getting really good at falling to my knees, screaming, crying, and punching pillows whenever I need to. This process often ends in spontaneous inspiration and songwriting.
It was this purging that really helped me find the grit in my voice, my wail.
My name comes from the Greek word katharos, or catharsis.
I think this is what I am doing.
Purging.
Releasing.
Dying.
Purifying.
Through expression. Through creation. Through destruction.
And Katya is the way through.
For now.