Every September, on the first day of school, the one thing I dreaded the most was attendance. In every class, my new teacher would get to my name on the attendance and would take a pause. Most of the time, there was no negative intention to butcher my name, but they always would. In my mind, it’s my fault, since I have a hard name to pronounce. Every year, without fail, I would have to correct my teachers.
Everyone always asked me where my name came from, and I never knew how to properly answer. My name was French, but my parents were not French and neither was I. People would tend to ask for my ethnicity in the next sentence. There were a lot of questions, and each time I had to answer them I felt worse about my name.
One of the worst parts has been ordering in restaurants. I would always be faced with someone who barely knew what to say, and I felt bad. So, I started lying about my name and saying “Anna”. It saved time, and questions. I never felt bad about it, because it saved me embarrassment. I started to realize how often it happened when I walked into Shake Shack and the worker would say hello to Anna. I only used this name with people I knew I was never going to meet again.
People would also ask me if I wanted to change my name, especially when I complained about it. My answer was always no. I found more stress in the big change, as well as it was the name my parents picked for me, the name that stuck with me my whole life. Not only that, I never found myself finding a name that suited me better.
When we first meet people, one of the first things we learn is their name. I don’t believe that people are defined by their name. After meeting multiple people with the same name, I learned that multiple people can have the same name and be vastly different people.
My name has always been a point of insecurity for me, another highlight of why I’m different, but I’ve grown to it. There’s no way to avoid it, so I simply have to come to terms with the fact that it’s hard to pronounce, and I have to live up the embarrassment. Changing names is a big theme, especially with culturally different names. I have grown to my name, and I have learned that it’s something I can’t change, so it is something I have to accept.