The story behind the name Luna

I have promised to make a post about the story behind the name Luna and today is the day. To be quite honest I’ve never told anyone why I use this name because it’s a very personal story but I decided to show courage and share it with everyone.
My real name is Ana and I got it by my grandmother. Originally my mother wanted to call me Julia but my father wanted for me to be Ana because my older sister got her name by our other grandmother and he wanted the same for me. Luna is the name I’ve used for many years for writing purposes and I came up with it when I was a little kid. To explain the whole story I have to go back to 1992.
As I stated in my Liebster Award post I’m actually of Bosnian origins. My family lived there for their entire life and then the war happened and my father fought in the war in Bosnia. During that time he got PTSD and started to drink heavily. My parents came to Germany after the war and 7 years later we came to Croatia. Due to my father’s mental problems he started to drink even more and got more and more abusive. He would beat the life out of my mother, sister and me and the police was a regular guest at our house. He developed an identity disorder and things only went downhill. Every time he would get drunk my mother would send me to my grandmother’s because it was unsafe to leave me alone with him. Because of the stressful situation we lived in I was a very nervous child, didn’t have an appetite, I was underweight and always ill because my immune system wasn’t very good. My mother, sister and I spent our days locked up in one room of our house because he would always attack and threaten to kill us if we went to use the kitchen or other parts of the house. Thankfully the bathroom was just on the opposite side of the room we were in so we could sneak to go to the bathroom. I even remember a little bit of a Christmas morning when my mother had to pay off all of my father’s drinking debts so we had no money to buy anything, my father was drunk again and my mother got up in the morning to make pancakes for me and my sister to eat. We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning eating cold pancakes, locked up in one room. No Christmas tree, no presents. I would actually spend a lot of time alone in that room, watching Spanish telenovelas and writing my own stuff like scenarios for my telenovela and poems about the actors. It was a way to kill time and that’s how I fell in love with writing.
Where I’m from the winters are very cold and back in the day we had central heating. My father turned it off one day saying we don’t deserve to get warm and I got extremely ill afterwards.
One day I just woke up without the ability to breath normally, my head was hurting and I had a high fever. After visiting my doctor we found out my problem was bordering with pneumonia but the doctor didn’t want to put me in the hospital because it was dangerous for me to be exposed to so many bacteria and viruses since my immune system practically didn’t exist. My mother couldn’t send me to my grandmothers and couldn’t take days off of work to take care of me because she would have been fired. My older sister had to go to school so I was on my own. My mother would get my sister ready for school and before leaving she would put a bucket with a lid next to me if I needed to throw up and she would lock me up in the room so my father wouldn’t get in and harm me. Since he was drunk and I wasn’t making any noises he didn’t even know I was there so I was safe. My health condition was very bad. I spent 10 days literally sleeping. I don’t remember much of that time but I do remember this. One night I ran out of air and suddenly woke up. My mother was next to me and my sister was in the other bed. The first thing I saw at that moment was the full moon through the blinds. In that moment I felt so calm, like nothing could hurt me. I can’t even explain it.

Seeing the moon just gave me a strong bond to nature, helped me realize that not all is lost and made me believe that just like nature renews itself I will renew my health and get better. It was like a feeling that the sky was watching over me. It was all probably the product of my fever but that night created the name Luna. As I said I watched a lot of Spanish telenovelas so I decided to go with the name Luna when I started sending my work to magazines or publishing it online. Luna in Spanish, as many of you know, means the moon.
This was very hard for me to write because I don’t like to talk about my father but I thought it was time to open up more and be more honest on the blog because I would like to share my experiences with abuse with others and maybe help them if they are currently struggling with it. If you went through the same thing before or are going through it now and need someone to talk to feel free to DM me on my Instagram or send me an email on luna.theblog@gmail.com

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