My parents named me Eibhlis, which I could spell by the time I was 4. Still, I had social anxiety while in school because of it.
Courtesy of the author
If you've got an unusual name, you know "the phase.'' The time when, as a gangly teen with acne and zero social skills, you absolutely dread explaining how to pronounce your name.
My dad's family is Irish, and my mom and dad were watching a documentary on Siamese twins — one called Katie and one called Eilish — while she was pregnant with me. They decided to nab the latter name, pronounced "eyelish," just slightly adapting the spelling.
I always thought it was beautiful, but the difficult pronunciation left me crippled with anxiety for years.
To be fair to them, I wasn't totally in the deep end; I could spell my name at 4. My mom bought foam letters that I stuck on the side of the bath each evening. Perhaps in sympathy, she had helped me almost nail the spelling before school.
However, the first day at school had still been confusing. I'd come out asking my mom why the teachers couldn't say my name. It was a curveball among the Sophies and Matthews, and nobody else in my first primary school class had a non-English name. It felt isolating when teachers knew everyone else's names straight away.
In high school there were others with unusual names, so I wasn't the only one having to explain pronunciations at registration. However, at around 12 years old, my social anxiety tripled. Public speaking, or basically speaking to anyone more than on a one-to-one basis, could bring uncontrollable shaking, dizzy spells, and stuttering words that refused to flow.
I dreaded speaking up and explaining my name to yet another supply teacher in front of a class of over 30 people. The start of the new school year was a nightmare, too, explaining my name to each teacher repeatedly until they cracked it or I finally accepted a slightly remixed version. Heaven forbid I ever got called on in assemblies when nearly 300 pupils crammed into a single hall.
Having that constant worry amplified my already lurking social anxiety. It also added to the usual teenage angst of struggling to find myself. You'd think having to explain pronunciation constantly would have helped me forge a more solid identity, but it actually did the opposite.
It worsened my people-pleasing tendencies when I'd just accept wrong pronunciations; I was called "Eeblis" for about two years by one science teacher. Instead of embracing my name, I found myself shrinking it to avoid the potential anxiety.
Some days, I wished the floor would swallow me up, most notably when my geography teacher somehow got "Elvis" from my name on the register, and everyone burst out laughing. It took me a long time to realize that my name was an identity, not a butt of a joke.
Gradually, though, something shifted. I learned my name's meaning — "God is my oath" and an Irish Gaelic adaptation of the name Elizabeth. I realized how endangered the Irish language was and how proud I was to carry that symbol of my heritage. I began to embrace the story it held — from the twins to my family history and, eventually, how it pushed me out of my comfort zone in those formative school years.
Most of all, my name never let me sit quietly in the back of a classroom, even when that's all I wanted to do. And for that, I'm very grateful.
