My Name

I was born to Meredith Wecker and Jeffrey Lincoln Johnson. They named me Satya Lincoln Johnson. "Satya" means "truth" in Sanskrit, and my father comes from a long line of Lincoln Johnsons.

Early on (in the first few months of my life), my friend Persephone and my grandfather Richard Wecker decided that my name was too weird and hard to pronounce, so for some reason they settled on Satch. "Satch" is pronounced "sɒtʃ" in IPA and rhymes with "watch".

When I was two my parents separated, and I grew up with Meredith Wecker, rarely seeing Jeffrey Johnson as he lived on the west coast while I lived on the east. My mother met my stepfather Andrew Kurowski at my third birthday party, and when I was six my sister was born and named Juniper Golondrina Kurowski-Wecker. We lived as a family of four from then on, and my last name, Johnson, was not shared by anyone else in my family, which felt strange.

When I was seven, my family bought the Benson Place Blueberry Farm, named after the Benson family who lived there and owned the Benson Ropeworks in the early eighteen hundreds. As I grew up there and felt a strong connection to the land, I chose Benson as my last name when I was seventeen, hoping the the rest of my family might follow. They did not.

When I started using the internet, I played around with several usernames but eventually settled on satchlj as it is simple, based on my nickname and initials, and wasn't already taken on most popular websites. Although I changed my last name, it did not seem worth it to change my username as well.