Why supernovia?

What a goofy online name, right? The TL;DR: It’s just a pun. A boyfriend called me Novia when he was learning Spanish. Mishearing at first, I went with SuperNovia instead, and it stuck pretty hard.

Anyway, this is a REALLY old blog post (circa 2003… that’s 21 years old at this edit!) and my life has changed a lot since then (minor edits added accordingly), but if you want to read about the name and when I thought I’d stop going by it, here you go!

Flash back to 1996, my senior year in high school. I was sick of the games boys played and vowed I’d never date again. (Hah!) So instead I hung out with my friend, a guy from work who’d coincidentally delivered newspapers in my neighborhood four years earlier, and who now had a locker next to mine.

We usually either went bowling or ate snowshak treats while we talked about life in general. I’m not sure how this happened, but one day as we were bowling the birds began to sing. My paperboy friend had just thrown a strike, and when he turned and smiled at me I realized I liked him as more than a friend. Little did I know he’d also been crushing on me.

After we discovered our mutual feelings we were inseparable. Well, mostly inseparable… I decided to spend a few months teaching English in Russian kindergartens with the International Language Program. My paperboy went to school and waited for me, and we wrote each other several times each week.

Then, shortly after I returned, my sweetie turned 19. We were mormons, and that’s was when boys were called to go on missions for two years. He was called to serve in Santiago Chile, and while learning Spanish took to calling me his Novia. First he said it on tape, and I thought he’d said Nova. Try as I might I couldn’t think of any good reason to be his exploding star. Was it supposed to be a compliment or what?

Nevertheless I figured I might as well go bigger and better, so I wrote back saying I’d be his SuperNova. He corrected me, explaining that the “i” in novia made it mean “girlfriend”. We had a good laugh about my mistake and the name SuperNovia stuck. So I made that my email address, my forum nickname, and I even made a website about waiting for a missionary.

You hear jokes about how you know you’re hopelessly addicted to the internet when you get a personalized license plate with your nick on it. SuperNovia was a fun name, and the meaning behind it was great, but it wasn’t just an internet issue by then: I was losing MY meaning. Even people at my work didn’t know me for who I was; they knew me as the girl who was waiting for a missionary. SuperNovia! I even made my own cape for Halloween. It was more of a joke than anything, but still it meant more to me than it should have. Instead of an identity it became a blindfold. I don’t think I even knew the real me.

I married this paperboy of mine shortly after he came home. But I have to let go of the super marriage fantasy. I’m realizing life doesn’t have to be this big perfect fairy tale, or comic book as the case may be. And really, who needs to build their entire identity around their feelings for someone else? Remember the song “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac, covered nicely by Smashing Pumpkins and later slaughtered by the Dixie Chicks?

“I’ve been afraid of changing Cause I’ve built my life around you.”

Afraid or not, I’m ready to reclaim my true identity. I’ve got a big heart with lots of love. But a SuperNovia? Probably not. So, if you’re still reading this article, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Velda.

Post Script, circa 2024: Back in 2003 I figured I’d stop going by SuperNovia; it felt like a sham given how the marriage had turned out. But it was still a fun online handle, and it stuck in our open source community. I liked the name more after I divorced, oddly enough. So here I am still!