You know you have an unconventional name if you’ve never owned a souvenir magnet with your name on it. Or a keychain, either, for that matter. You know you have an unconventional name if you can count on your name being mispronounced when attendance is called in class. Or if you’ve had to request that a nametag or club T-shirt be remade more than once after a spelling error. Or if posting a comment or sending an email can lead to confusion about your gender.
If you identify with any of these scenarios, I can sympathize with you. Simply put, I don’t have a very popular first name, and having an uncommon first name–especially when paired with an exceptionally rare last name–hasn’t always lead to an easy time whilst filling out forms or trying to accomplish anything important over the phone (after spelling my name three times, the library still claimed they had no cards under the name Neviska). Add in the heavy political undertones that come along with sharing the name of our 40th President, and my name, Reagan Neviska, is quite loaded.
My eighteen years have held a wide variety of conversations about my name. The reviews have been all over the board. I’ve been told that it’s beautiful, I’ve been told that it’s unique, I’ve been told that people felt sorry for me–nice, right? I once stumbled upon a webpage on which people made awful comments about the name Reagan, calling it “a mouthful”, “trashy”, “unfeminine”, “boyish”, and “ugly.” Sometimes it’s nice to have a built-in conversation starter to carry around with you, and at times the discussion about can seem trivial; after all, we all have names, unique or not. There are, however, times when a conversation will really spark some thoughts in me, and bring to mind the everlasting question: Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
When people ask me about my name, my answer is simple: I didn’t choose it. It was given to me. To me, my name is a gift. Maybe my life would be simpler if I’d been given another name, but I would never want that. Many people have tried to give me nicknames, but I’ve always preferred my name in an unadulterated form. Reagan–a name that, despite everything, I really like. If you have a unique name, embrace it. Maybe you can’t have a souvenir magnet, but you have something special, a title that is the quintessential you.