There once lived a girl in a land far away who was as beautiful as she was intelligent, and as intelligent as she was kind. But she had The Plainest Name in the World. You might ask me what this name was, but, as I said, this was a far-away land in a long-ago time, where languages and customs differ from ours, and so to us it might sound exotic and enticing, but to her, at that time and in that place, her name was plain as pumpernickel, and she hated pumpernickel.
Now, I need to tell you another thing about her. She was adopted at birth. And when you're adopted, sometimes you're free to imagine what your birth parents are like, and how life would have been different. Perhaps, she thought sometimes, she was really a princess, and that someday her real name and her real royalty would be revealed to all. And she let her imagination run free — as I said, she was an intelligent child — and she came up with one fantastic name after another. Sometimes, she would try them out on her friends and family. "Call me this," she'd say, or "Call me that." And her friends and family would acquiesce and do their best to call her by the latest name. Not always, you understand, but often enough that some friends knew her as this, and some friends knew her as that, which sometimes grows confusing.
As she was passing from being a little girl to a young woman, she contracted a terrible illness. Day after day, and week after week, she was in terrible pain that eluded relief. The parents, though they loved her, were unable to quiet the pains. They tried almost every way to find a cure: doctors upon doctors, prayer, natural methods, counselors... It reached a point where the young woman felt erased — as if the plainness of her name entered her body and her soul and threatened to efface her completely.
And here, something like a miracle occurred. She decided she would no longer be ill, and not long after, she was not. She rose from her bed, faced her fears, exercised and fed her body well, paid attention to the real world around her, and the pain subsided, at least at first.
And she chose a new name for herself — again, I cannot tell you what it was, for this was long ago and far away. But I know that it had something to do with vowing, and something to do with the number seven (which in that land was the number of perfect things) and something to do with the divine. And, if I was told aright, it sounded a little bit fancy and a little bit familiar — as sweet and smart as she was. One could even imagine it as a princess's name. Now I do not know if the name helped her heal, or her health brought out her new name, but I suppose it doesn't quite matter — chickens and eggs are both causes and effects, and it doesn't quite matter which came first.
I wish I could say that her illness never bothered her again. But she was bothered, even as she grew out of her young womanhood. In real life, people do not live happily ever after — or, better, in real life, one's happiness is born of difficulty, not from its absence. In her secret heart, though, she treasured the changes in her self, and she treasured the name she chose for her self. She drew strength, too, from her family and her friends (and, I should add, her precious cat, whose name was beyond marvelous and whose character was impeccable). Sometimes she felt a divine spark within herself that she didn't quite understand, and she wasn't quite sure whether she wanted to extinguish or foster it. She even met a occasional man as intelligent, handsome, and kind as she was.
And thus began her adulthood, an unfinished story of which she was a co-author. You may wonder what happened will have to wait and see.