Blog Post 2: Why I Changed My Name

This is a blog for survivors of extreme trauma. To trust me, I feel you should know a little about the author. See About Me on my website for my bio. For now, please know that my legal name is Mira Wallace.

But that is not my birth name.

Why did I change my name?

My Names

On this website, my name is Amira, an Arabic name that means leader or princess. Undergraduate Jordanian friends at Yarmouk University gave me this nickname n 1984 when I studied Arabic in Irbid, Jordan. (I’m not sure why!)

In May 2022, I did something unusual. After selling my small business of 21 years, I  immediately changed my first and last name to Mira Wallace. Legally.

That act brought me tremendous joy and gratification. I’m still excited. I was 67.

It’s unusual to change one’s name so late in life. I took this step for reasons of trauma and identity. That is, I changed my name to take control of my life. To rename myself was to reclaim my life story from a history of trauma and mold it to my vision. To tell the world: “I am not what you made me. I am who I made myself.”

Wallace is my mother’s maiden name. Mira is a slightly Anglicized version of Amira, a name that exists in many countries around the world.

And Amira? Amira is a story unto herself. More about her later. She is simply who I am.

Why I took my mother’s maiden name

As a feminist in my own way, I’ve believed since my early twenties that ideally boys would take their father’s last name and girls would have their mother’s. (I came up with this idea long before we understood, as a society, that gender is not only binary..)

Back then in the 1970s, people often told me having different family names for girls and boys was foolish and unwieldy. It would sow confusion in schools, healthcare and children’s activities.

Flash forward. Look how many families have multiple names now!

When I was twenty-three and getting a divorce, I decided to take my mother’s last name legally. I changed my mind because my loving father begged me not to. In 2018, my father died, but by then my name was attached to my small business of many years.

Two weeks after selling that business, in 2022, I changed my name.

Why I changed my first name

With due respect to my parents, I hated my birth name. For some reason, I found it apt for a domestic, content, sedate and happy woman.

That wasn’t my life.

At the age of 16, I dropped out of school, moved away from home and became a professional actress for a year. For over a decade I was anorexic and suicidally depressed. I had panic attacks, dysphoric mania, hallucinations and psychogenic seizures. Twice, I stood on the brink of psychosis. 

At 27 I went into remission and enjoyed a decade of happiness and fulfillment, especially after marrying my beloved husband. But misery slammed me again in my late thirties. I had terrifying hallucinations (one lasted several hours), episodes of mania that hurled me into heaven and hell, bizarre trance states, seizures and journeys to a magical world that existed only in my mind.

Finally, at age 39 I learned I had Multiple Personality Disorder—the old name for dissociative identity disorder. The root of it all was an extreme history of serial sexual assault and rape that began age 11 and ended at 30. Altogether, I experienced thirteen incidents or relationships of sexual abuse.

Yet somehow I didn’t “notice” them. I had gone numb.

Life under my old name

As a young woman who grew up in Canada, during my twenties I lived in eight countries and traveled through many others. I studied at eight universities around the world, earning a BA and MA in French linguistics from Université Laval in Quebec City as well as certificates in Spanish philology, German literature and advanced Arabic from universities in Spain, Germany and Jordan.

I began and later abandoned PhD studies in Arabic linguistics at McGill.

My several careers included teaching English and French in Germany and Paris, for two immigrant schools in Quebec, at universities in Quebec and Jordan and in a middle school in Baltimore. I worked and volunteered for several years for various nonprofits, including one that provided human services to more than 2,000 immigrants and refugees per year. Beginning in late 2000, for 21 years I owned and directed a national training business for community interpreters. It became the nationally leading agency in our field.

By my fifties, I was well known. I sat on national and international committees, boards and advisory groups. I was a keynote, plenary or panel speaker across the U.S. and abroad. As the world project leader for an ISO international standard, I worked with interpreting and language specialists from more than 40 countries and international organizations such as the European Union, European Commission and the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters.

By the time I sold it in 2022, my small business had licensed more than 440 trainers to teach our programs in 44 U.S. states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and six other countries. Our programs trained interpreters who spoke nearly 100 languages and came from (or lived in) nearly 100 countries and all seven continents—Antarctica included.

The weekly newsletter I wrote had more than 16,000 subscribers in 106 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Our textbooks, training manuals and workbooks were sold to 30 countries and all 50 U.S. states. We sold more than 4,000 online courses and delivered in-person training to thousands more. In just two years, more than 14,000 people around the world attended our webinars. Our publishing imprint sold textbooks, training manuals and workbooks to 30 countries, all fifty U.S. states and more than 90 universities and colleges. I authored articles, research, chapters in books, monographs, book reviews, journalism, textbooks and more.

In my field, “Marjory Bancroft” was almost a brand name. (Which baffled me.) I never tried to become famous. And I felt like an imposter. It was hard to grasp that people didn’t see me as a sham. Imposter syndrome, yes, but so much more.

I was a mask. And people mistook the mask for who I was.

Including me.

Working with and for trauma survivors

Yet I found ways to work, often extensively, with and for trauma survivors. For example, in 2009 I launched a project that I co-directed for five years. It was a registered charity from 2011 to 2016. After recruiting about 100 volunteers across the U.S., The Voice of Love Project created programs to train professional interpreters how to perform trauma-informed interpreting for survivors of torture, war trauma and sexual violence.

I also spent extensive hours on paid and volunteer projects that supported trauma survivors of gender-based violence, sexual assault, rape, torture, war trauma, child abuse, domestic violence and more, working alongside national and international experts in many fields. Their expertise humbled me.

In short, my heart was always with trauma survivors. 

Upon retirement, changing my name empowered me to found the Interpreter of Love Project. In this sense, the name change is really about you,. Changing my name allowed me to pivot freely to my fellow survivors, freed of all traces of “Marjory Bancroft” and old responsibilities.

Changing my name has helped me do that. I’m not advocating you change your name too! But doing so helped me steer the rudder of my ship to you.

Steering our ship matters hugely for trauma survivors. It is important to feel we control of our lives and make free choices. To do and not to be done to. To live, not exist. To act and be.

Most of all, to become ourselves. Our own true selves.

If I with my extreme history of trauma can live with joy, I believe you can too.

Why I took the name Mira

Although my pen name on this website is Amira, my legal name is Mira. Mira has beautiful meanings in several languages, for example, peace in Bosnian and Russian; princess, leader or ruler in Arabic; world in Russian; prosperous in Sanskrit; wonderful or marvelous in Latin; sea or ocean in Hindi. 

And Amira?

Amira is who I am. Wholly.

Before I ever knew consciously how trauma shaped my life, I felt ugly, small, diminished and disgusting. Someone that no one could ever love.

I didn’t know I had Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now known as dissociative identity disorder, or DID. (I dislike that name, by the way, because DID describes the etiology of the disorder but not the experience of living it. If you live with MPD, you feel you are several people in one body. Not several identities but several people. At least, that’s how it felt to me.)

The question in MPD/DID is this: who leads the pack of “us”?

Historically, specialists viewed the central “alter” (personality) who runs daily life and is usually called the “host” as the true leader. (“Alter” is the clinical name for different selves or identity states within someone who has DID.) The idea is that the host is the core person who will eventually unite all alters in one identity.

For those of us with this disorder, the host typically manages our day-to-day lives. Perhaps that is the main reason therapists tend to consider the host as the primary or central identity. But I disagree, at least in some cases. At least, that wasn’t true for me.

My host was “Marjory Bancroft.” Internally, I took my identity from the leader of my women, who was reclusive and secret but made more deep decisions about my life than any of us—perhaps more than all of us put together.

The name that inner leader gave herself was my nickname: Amira. On healing from MPD/DID in 1994, I slowly became Amira. A clandestine Amira back then because I had a job, a family and a conventional life to live as “Marjory.”

But now I am retired, I can be who I simply am. And so I have founded this project for my fellow survivors. Your souls are beautiful to me. On that note, I close this rather personal blog by saying I wish you the joy of taking control of your own life, however and whenever you choose to do so. You don’t need to change your name, but I hope you will choose the life you want and joyfully remake it to your vision.

Craft your life. Imagine it and envision who you want to be, where you wish to go, what you hope to accomplish. Even if your vision is simply a life of dignity and contentment with a loving family, that is a powerful vision in itself.

Write it down, if you can. Language holds power. The words you choose can help reshape your life. Just as research shows that writing down your trauma story can help you heal (more than that too in other blog posts), writing down a vision for your life can help as well.

This process of envisioning your life is one I will discuss in many upcoming posts of this blog. and on my vlog as well (The Only Way Out). In the project’s private members-only space, I encourage you to believe that envisioning is core to healing, just as knowing and building on your strengths is a fundamental prerequisite for healing. And to share your vision for your life with other survivors.

Language can both reify and reinforce that vision. There is a growing body of evidence-based studies in psychiatry and psychology to support these premises. I will discuss that research in later posts.

Of course, I am no clinician, only a survivor like you. But I will always support evidence-based medicine that is trustworthy.

For now, please know my heart is with you. You are not alone. Those who live or have ever lived in darkness” we are kindred. We know our own.

Stay alive. Keep hope in your heart. Trust that the future can be better. I love you. I am with you. If you feel alone now, one day you will find other hearts that love you too.

Hugs and kisses,

Amira