Post 20 of a 30-day challenge
You know when you walk into Starbucks and you tell them your name for your order? In an English-speaking country, there’s a good chance they spelled it correctly. And the barista didn’t have to ask you 3 times how to spell it. Likely because it was a familiar English name. The kind of name you see in books, or of characters from TV shows. Names like, James, Laura, Michael. That’s Starbucks privilege.
So, story time.
I’ve been Jane since March 2021. Previously, I went by a different name. It was hard to pronounce and hard to remember, unless you’ve lived in the UK and have met other people with that name. It wasn’t a problem when I studied in the UK. In Asia, it was a nightmare.
Pre-2021, I was known as Siân – that’s Welsh, pronounced Shahn, and equivalent to Jane in English. To Singaporeans, Siân resembled sian (bored) in Hokkien. If I had a dollar for the number of times someone made a joke about this… Outside of Singapore, new acquaintances were perplexed by how my name’s pronunciation didn’t match to how it was spelled. I could really see the hamster running furiously in its wheel to reconcile this. As an aside, I unexpectedly found it to be a test of someone’s conscientiousness if they typed my name with the circumflex accent over the a (that’s the â).
The cognitive power required to program my name into someone’s consciousness was clearly too high. This was frustrating, awkward, and embarrassing for both sides. Over the 15 years that I went by Siân, I noticed that I started to feel stressed about introducing myself to people. I anticipated having to deal with the awkwardness and embarrassment. To make it worse, not only was it hard to pronounce, it was also very hard to remember. It really took a progressive toll on my self-esteem and confidence, which I never expected.
So I started a series of experiments (I should write about that some time) to see if calling myself Jane would change anything. To my delight, it did, and I made the switch in 2021. Reintroducing myself to friends and renewed acquaintances was like coming out. Everyone was kind (in my head, I feared judgment), and many changed my name in their contacts book on the spot.
And that’s how I now enjoy Starbucks privilege*.
By the way, if you meet anyone whose name looks “hard to pronounce”, at least try.
*I don’t actually drink coffee from Starbucks on a regular basis, the last one I visited was in 2020.