I was supposed to be working on a rather heavy and bureaucratic translation from Danish into English so was doing everything in my power to procrastinate. Eventually, for want of something better to do, I joined Marcel in the TV room. He happened to be re-watching the US series 'The Office' and was on one of the first few episodes. I'm not much of a TV watcher so had never seen either version of The Office. I lay on the couch chatting to the two biggies and at least three episodes passed in the corner of the room. I was surprised to find there was a character named Phyllis (ironically played by someone who is really called Phyllis - the poor besom has no escape!). She was plain, overweight, frumpy and in her early 60s. That seemed fair enough, appropriate in fact. It set me to thinking.
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So there was granny Phyllis (above). The other two Phyllises I remember when I was growing up were: Phyllis Diller - she was on TV occasionally and my other gran would watch her. And Phyllis (whose surname I never caught): a fictional character in her 70s on the long-running soap opera Coronation Street. My own family were not Corrie watchers, but almost everyone I knew did watch it. I knew she was old with a blue rinse, but I never worked out whether she was a sympathetic character or otherwise. So I grew up with three reference points: a woman born in 1910 and two born in 1917.
Phyllis from The Office seems to have been born in 1951. I was born in 1968.
So all of my life Phyllises have been middle-aged, and frumpy. A Phyllis is not a young person. A Phyllis is not a particularly attractive person. She can be kind or cuddly or sweet but she is old and plain. I hated my name as a schoolchild because I could not see a correlation between Phyllisness and what I saw in the mirror. I wanted to be called Phyl, because that was slightly better than Phyllis - because it was less Phyllis-y... if that makes any sense. When I was, say 20, I looked like this:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOgNn_kQwL5jXZ-AgNH6S_ZzMT_NuhgZRDj35QSG2YzYlRzQfJYhf0XCIhtv7F5qABxMUyv9YxMBMHaySNrlK4z8JN4Zm9aW2ECQGFcWBnERAIVwimHmA8tOrkI0sBbh8CI2Fm7A/s200/phyllis.jpg)
but Phyllises were middle-aged, plain and frumpy. So although I was young, thin and pleasant-enough looking, I felt plain and unattractive because that is what Phyllises look like. As a middle-aged woman now, I can see I was not particularly frumpy, but I felt frumpy then because I felt Phyllis-y! When I watched The Office last night and saw Phyllis, I suddenly realized that the reason I am becoming more comfortable with being a Phyllis as I reach my late 40s is probably because I am growing into the roll. I will one day reach an age that corresponds to my name!
There is sadly no longer a huge gulf between the characters with that name and the face I currently see in the mirror and that makes me strangely more at ease with the persona I am meant to portray to the outside world. On a bad day, in my reading specs, I could almost pass for a Phyllis.
I guess I have spent a lifetime growing into my name and although I will probably never like it, I at least am slowly starting to suit it. It took seeing The Office to help me realize that my problem wasn't my name itself but the fact that I never met a Phyllis of my own age. Phyllis is actually a pretty enough name, it is the fact that it has been defined by the outside world as old, unattractive and boring that has been my problem all along. I think I'd have coped better with it if I had ever met a Phyllis of a different generation, younger or older, but the fact that a Phyllis was never under 60 didn't really sit well with me till now. I needed a name that was so unique there were no preconceived notions around it, or a name that you met often enough to have no fixed idea of. But I think when asked to describe a Phyllis, you'd probably come up with Phyllis from The Office!
So who knows, 15 years from now, I may be very happy to be a Phyllis!
So who knows, 15 years from now, I may be very happy to be a Phyllis!
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