Does Every Girl Go Through a Phase Where She Spells Her Name a Silly Way?
I Know I Did
Thewriteyard just wrote an essay about all the names she’s been called in her life. When she was a teenager, she tells us, she disliked her name. So she decided to do something about it:
As a teenager, I hated my name. Why on earth did they call me Carol when I wasn’t born anytime near Christmas? I have no idea why my parents chose that name. I don’t know of any other Carols in the family. So I started spelling it Karrell.
She describes this as a rare “teenage act of insurrection.” Otherwise, she says, “I was generally very well behaved.” Eventually, she went back to being Carol.
Carol’s post inspired Nancy Peckenham to write an essay about the changes her own name has gone through. She, too, once experimented with the spelling of her name:
My name is Nancy Peckenham and most people call me that. As a child… I tried to give some flare to what I thought was a dumb first name by spelling it Nancee, jettisoning the ‘y.’
I hadn’t realized that young girls deciding to give their names a silly spelling was a thing. But? When I was twelve — I did this too! In middle school and striving to be cool, I started spelling my name with a “y” instead of an “i.”
For a couple of years, I went around insisting that I was Rosalynd, not Rosalind.
Most people, of course, just continued to call me “Roz,” because that’s who I’d always been. Plus, it was easier. Eventually I stopped thinking that being Rosalynd was a good idea and accepted — even celebrated — — the fact that I was Roz.
Still, I have no regrets about my silly name spelling phase. And? I totally get why this is a thing.
You hit adolescence. Suddenly, everything is changing. You’re awash in strange hormones that are altering everything about you. You long to fit in. But — you want to be unique! You’re trying to stay in control. But there’s no way you can. So? You change the way you spell your name.
When you’re twelve, it’s one of the few things you have any control over.
It’s a way of signaling to the world that you’re still the same person you always were — but…
