With the risk of someone Google searching me, printing out Mapquest directions to where I live and placing an order on EBay for super strong rope, duct tape, and a nice rusty shovel, I'm going to talk about my full, obnoxious name. Anastasia Marie Gedda-Shaheen. Fun fact: my name is the same length as the alphabet. Now, I know that if by chance any of you reading this don't already know me then you may be pronouncing with a obscure accent and some misplaced emphasis on almost every syllable. It's just Ann-uh-stay-sh-uh Muh-ree (that ones easy but typing phonetically is too fun!) Jet-uh Shu-he-n.
I've always felt very weird about my name. As a kid it was because I wanted to just be one of the boys so when someone said my full name all I could hear was "Hey super girly girl! You should be wearing a dress! Don't you wanna go play with Barbies and make-up and stuff?" I especially despised when people assumed they could call me Anna. I'm not even gonna start on the frequency of that occurance because I could write a trilogy about it. Thankfully, my Dad's affinity for unique names got me the nickname Stasia instead. I never introduced myself as Stasia, but my friends would eventually pick up on it from my family and when their tongues started to get exhausted after spitting out so many syllables just to get my attention they adopted it themselves. These uneasy feelings about a name that stuck out— quit literally when seen on a class list— followed me through middle school and high school when all I wanted was to fit in. But by senior year, I was relatively well known in my small class so I didn't have to deal with the awkward name situation unless we had a substitute teacher. It didn't bother me then though because the whole class would laugh at them with me for saying it weird. (Side note: mad respect to anyone that has ever been a substitute teacher, that job sucks on so many levels.) As a freshmen in college everyone I encounter is new which means all my childhood insecurities have been coming back to suck all of the juice out of my adolescent ego that has shriveled up like an emptied Caprisun as a result.
For my first class as a college student I walked in with the goal of making a cool calm and collected impression on my new peers. To combat my non-existant fashion sense, I went to all of my classes wearing an outfit that had at one point in the past been approved by one of my sisters, right down to how I was wearing my shoes. Provided with one of those chair-desk combos, the desk space smaller than my notebook, I try sit like a normal, dignified, adult-type person in furniture made for a hobbit. Actually I bet a hobbit wouldn't even feel uncomfortable in one of these desks. So I adjust myself to a tolerable position and resist fidgeting around and screaming about the madness of a society that expects people to get an education while trapped in a slave chair.At this point I'm real confident that I'm already acing this cool person impression.
Then my Professor introduces himself and announces he is going to take role. He goes through the list of mostly very normal names like Mike, Christina, Alexis and such. By this time my cool person act has slipped my mind and I am now slouching in my chair and shaking all my nervous energy out through my frantically bopping right leg. My professors steady progression through the list of students is interrupted when he lets out a soft and quick sigh of defeat then calls out, "Uh... Aun-A-sTa-see-A Ged-duh ShA-neen?" Everyone looks around for a victorian era princess dressed in a hoop-skirt dress, overflowing with ruffles, waiving her silk-gloved hand smoothly through the air, acknowledging the peasants and mocking them with her intricately styled hair topped with a petite triara that emphasizes her level of eccentric extravagance.
Instead a hand reluctantly pops out from the crowd of curious faces and claims that name as her own. Unfortunately that hand belonged to me. And even more unfortunately that hand was attached to my arm, which was attached to a body that supported a very embarrassed head. I felt a sense of urgency to correct him, making me nervous, which always translates into my speech as unnatural rises and falls of pitch and entire sentences disappearing in tense a slur. I corrected his pronunciation, feeling like a Snooty McTooty. I tried to ensure that no one thought I was a weird person that would berate a person for saying my name wrong by announcing, "Its really not that fancy I swear! Its just like normal. I don't know..." I got a few sympathy laughs. I'm not even sure there is such thing as a sympathy laugh, but I spent the next 20 minutes convincing myself that it was to ease my bruised ego.
Luckily, being at a new school has given me the chance to practice introducing myself. Since every person I run into here is new, I get a chance to try out telling people my name without acting like I'm scared of it. I give my self a pep talk once a day or so and convince myself that my name will only be as weird to others as I make it. This is a great example of how I like to deal with my problems: I lie to myself until it becomes true. I'm quite a convincing liar. I probably lying to myself right now about being a good liar. Let that one fester in your brain and hatch little baby thoughts of speculation! Eventually, after I've worked through my issues, my name won't be so detrimental to me in social situations, but according to my communication professor its gonna be a huge barrier in my career. So since my parents gave me a freaky name, they shouldn't be surprised when they end up with a freaky, basement dwelling daughter that had to move back in because employers were afraid of her name.
My roommate just asked me if blogging about my name wasn't a bit narcissistic. To that I responded, "Isn't just blogging by itself already narcissistic?" Also I find it kind of ironic how I just wrote about how uncomfortable I am talking about myself to a big group of people and put it on the internet where potentially millions of people could see it. Realistically though I know that people reading this probably know me anyways so maybe that's why I have no qualms about it. I can't think of a cohesive, silly, or meaningful way to end this post. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
You're probably safe from job problems, despite inspiring the same uncertainty about pronunciation in bosses as the names studied. Anastasia is an old classic with which most people are familiar, not a recent invention, it's gender normalized for how you present (even if you feel it implies an inaccurate, er, extreme of gender), and it's Americanized. I mean, it's still a long overall name and inconvenient, but you're not tripping the usual traps that keep unique names down.
ReplyDeleteI hear you on the princess-y name. My legal first name translates to princess, and was the most common name in the U.S. basically the entire decade I was born. There were 4 girls with my name in a class of 65 when I went to a different school in 4th grade, and the other 3 were super girly girls. I have since opted INto the unpromotable name crowd, but since my last name is unpronounceable, it's a lateral move.