Connie Lee - Autobiographical Writing

To tell the truth I never really thought much about my name other than not liking how common it was. I have a common first name and common last name, and it’s not even one of those really nice sounding common names like Sophie or Claire. Oh well, it was a name, my name, and I used it as long as I could get by. It was not until we had to do an individual project in chemistry class one year did I really think about whether I liked my name or not. Each of us was assigned an element from the periodic table and we had to make a poster introducing our element. The first students assigned to an element were the ones that had initials that stood for an element. Surprisingly, our grade happened to have a lot of these names. We had Alex Girkin, Ag for silver, Pedro Botas, Pb for lead, Nisha Emich, Ne for Neon… and even more surprisingly I was one of these people, Cl for chlorine. I never knew my name had such a connection to chemistry. Actually I didn’t really know what chlorine was, because we didn’t learn anything about the elements yet, so I went ahead and looked it up. After some research I was not so please to find out that chlorine was actually a disgusting smelling green poisonous gas used to clean swimming pools. Others people’s names stood for shiny metals or cool glowing stuff and mine stood for a green poisonous gas. So adding this to not really liking how common my name was, there was a time where I just did not like my name that much. But now I don’t really mind anymore; and if you look on the bright side, I don’t think it would be pleasant to jump into a pool without chlorine anyway, right?