A Boy Named Doris

This story was originally published in Issue 09 of Phase Zero. You can (and should!) purchase the issue here.

A boy named Doris will live life at a certain disadvantage. Given his femininely antiquated name, it will likely be incredibly difficult for him to assert himself as any kind of masculine figure around his peers. This will make garnering respect and friendship somewhat tough for him. Young boys are not exactly the most progressive population when it comes to understanding differences of those around them, thus with a name like Doris, he will basically just be asking to be ridiculed, objectified, or outcast. And this will be very difficult for a boy named Doris, for his name will not be something he can help nor will it be something that he, up until this point in his life, will have likely considered feeling bad or self-conscious about. For if a boy is actually named Doris, there is a good chance that it will be because it is a family name and, thus, something he had been taught to actually value and revere all his life. 

And if a boy named Doris is strong-willed, he will take the mocking from his peers in stride. Perhaps the experience will even make him more masculine than he would have been with a more normatively male first name. He would not be the first boy to over-compensate for a perceived flaw in his manhood. 

But even if a boy named Doris grows a bit older, and becomes a bit manlier, a bit less boyish––perhaps he starts lifting weights, hunting, or dedicates his life to having wild sex with a large number of women––he will still likely be aware of some fundamental difference in himself that his name is somehow solely responsible for. For a boy named Doris, if he is perceptive, which he will have to be simply due to the social difficulties he will have faced by this point, will realize that forming unfair assumptions is a basic part of being a person and meeting another person. One can only comprehend so much at a time, thus one has to latch onto what is most noticeable or distinct upon meeting a person and use it as an anchor to one’s further understanding of another. A boy named Doris will realize that he is not much different in this regard from a boy named John who has a large nose, a boy named Alex who is somewhat overweight, or even a girl named Vanessa who cannot pronounce her R’s properly. These things do not define them, but they are, nonetheless, a part of them, and given their noticeability work in a definitional way at least when first getting to know someone. 

And this might provide a boy named Doris a momentary respite. For it will likely be the first time in a good long while that he feels on common ground with his peers. He might walk about with a certain gracefulness and lightness, at least for a short period of time, thinking that he is no different from anyone else. And this will be good. But this will also likely be very brief. 

For a boy named Doris, who at this point will have developed some rather extensive skills for self-examination through his childhood and adolescence, it will not take long to realize that despite the truth of the matter that everyone lives with these divides he sees between himself and the rest of the world created by rather hapless and random features and circumstances, it is seemingly only him that is so deeply upset about it––Vanessa with the bad R’s still gets up and speaks in front of the class without hesitation, overweight Alex still finds the confidence in himself to flirt with the prettiest girl in the class, Stacy. And this, his self-consciousness on the matter, itself is the issue. For a boy named Doris may realize that the isolation he has felt for much of his life, which, up until this point, he has attributed to an external facet of his being––i.e. his name being Doris––and the external world’s reaction to, has, in fact, been produced by much more internal mechanisms than he had previously realized. No one can make you feel isolated. That comes from inside. 

This could very easily become a burden for a boy named Doris, for this is an incredibly difficult thought to unthink. A boy named Doris might see it begin to texture nearly every relationship he holds and the isolation that this thought brings might transform into something much more acute and disconcerting. For unlike before, his perceived isolation will not be due to external forces––it will not be due to a world unfairly judging him for his absurd name––but, rather, it will be because of forces going on within himself that he seemingly cannot help. It will begin to seem like something that will be more or less impossible to fix. A boy named Doris may do everything he can to avoid facing this truth, but the more a boy named Doris might attempt to free himself of this burden, perhaps, the further entrenched he will find himself in it. The more he tries to move on and forget about it, the less he might find himself able to do so. For moving on, a boy named Doris may realize, is simply a conscious act of denial. The truth of his existence that has burdened him so much will not be disproven, or grappled with, but it will simply be ignored. This means that it is truer than before and this will likely make a boy named Doris feel incredibly weak and self-loathsome for his inability to get over such a trivial idea that seemingly everyone else is not bothered with in the slightest. 

But a boy named Doris will only be able to hate himself for so long. He will have spent an entire life being ridiculed and feeling isolated and by this point he may very well have had enough of this sort of thinking. A boy named Doris may in fact move these poisonous thoughts outward, toward the world that he so wishes to be connected to but which is so ignorant of the truth of its existence therefore making that connection impossible. A boy named Doris may begin to hate everything he sees. Walking about the world, seeing people chatting away, laughing, finding love, getting married, may begin to infuriate him and fill him with an envy and bitterness that burns him like fire. And this bitterness may grow and grow. He may feel it at every moment of his life, and around every person he sees. A boy named Doris may even begin to look at his own parents scornfully, for it will be them that will have named a boy named Doris, Doris, and it will be them who he should feel the deepest and widest of connection to––a feeling of being seen wholly for himself and all that he is capable of––but it will be them who he feels nothing but disconnected from, and hate towards for ever birthing him, naming him, and making that feeling of disconnection possible. And a boy named Doris, upon realizing all of this, may in fact begin to desire to enact truly heinous things upon them for burdening his life with this never ending loop of isolatory thought. 

And this might scare a boy named Doris. A boy named Doris will likely not want to think these things about his own parents, but by this point he will have proven to himself that his wanting or not wanting to think something, and what he actually ends up thinking are quite different matters entirely. A boy named Doris, by this point, will likely know that he cannot trust himself nor the mind within his skull, thus it will only be a matter of time before these heinous thoughts move from inside of his head and begin to materialize in the world around him. 

Likely not knowing what else to do, a boy named Doris, who by this point will not be a boy at all but will rather be a man, will perhaps decide to move far, far away. He may move to a tiny mountain town in Idaho named Ketchum, whose population is less than his high school’s was and whose only claim to fame is that a famous author once died there after losing his mind. And he may live out his days there in near complete isolation, fearing his own mind and the evil

it is capable of. Just him, alone, boarded up in an old ranch house with ancient and chipping wood siding and window shutters that hang loosely crooked as if drunk or ill. Miles and miles away from anyone else in Ketchum, the only person he sees every day being the mailman, and even that is from more than a quarter-mile away and through the scope of a thirty-aught-six rifle, which he carries around strapped to his back at all times in his day other than when he is sleeping or using the restroom. 

This is all possible. Stranger things have happened. But, also, this is just one possibility. There are countless others. Perhaps a boy named Doris grows up with nurturing and thoughtful parents that allow him to change his name and change schools and start fresh at the first sign of distress and he never has to deal with any of these issues at all. Or, perhaps, a boy named Doris attends psychotherapy at some point in his young adulthood and discovers that his preoccupation with his solipsism is rooted in some central trauma of his childhood that after a couple years he is able to unlock and come to terms with and actually, really, move on from. Perhaps this will feel like the biggest weight off of his shoulders imaginable and perhaps he will begin living an incredibly grateful life from then on out. Things like this happen all the time. 

And maybe a boy named Doris will have a supportive and engaging friend group that he really connects with in college who don’t care too much about his name as they are all a relatively strange and outlandish group, and with whom he takes LSD with on one cold winter evening in the frozen hills of Western Massachusetts, where the wind is whipping against his window wildly, and he comes to the realization, there on the cheap, stained carpet of his dorm room floor, that a “real identity” is somewhat of a farce, and that people more or less just walk in and out of rooms their whole lives as he has been watching his friends do all evening, becoming something new every time they enter and then leaving it behind as soon as they walk out. Like spirits floating about in the nether. Like a continuous tide washing up on an infinite shore, washing away every footstep and imprint left prior and starting anew. 

Any of this is possible. Anything may happen to a boy named Doris. Truly anything.