(Don’t share your real name, obviously)
Okay so, wall of text warning:
My legal name is a Chinese name, three characters.
Family name (one character) is said/written first, then the given name (two characters for me… and I assume for most people).
Its a very interesting name, and overall naming system, each character has meaning, well other than the family name which I don’t think it really means anything.
My older brother’s first character is the same as mine, only the second character is different. (It’s [Family Name] + [Character A] + [Character B], Character A is the same.)
I have never met anyone with my exact name, well to be fair, being in the US made those odds even rarer. I did meet someone with the same family name in a US school, and they also had the same DoB as me, which was very weird coincidence.
But my name is so rare in the US, if it ever got leaked, that’s practically a unique identifier.
When I look at my name, idk I kinda feel a sense of antiquity. I have a genology book and the pages are falling apart, I had to scan it and made a .pdf from it. I mean those names are from hundred of years ago, I guess they had to keep remaking/rewriting those books because I doubt something from pre-1800s would’ve survived till now. It makes modern tech feel so futuristic when I think about it, I mean, that geneology book could potentially live om forever, without any deterioation unlike a book.
But simultaneously, when I look at my name, it kinda reminds me of my parent’s emotional abusive and neglectful behaviors. Ugh, idk, feels so conflicted about it. I really wanna ask questions about the past, but we aren’t really on speaking-terms anymore.
When people ask my name, it’s always just so awkward, since… the pronounciation is totally foreign to them. I kinda wanted to choose an English name for simplicity here in the US, but like… I didn’t pick one when I was younger and I think its kinda too late to use one now. Idk what name to even choose.
Name is pretty much as Porguguese as it gets. And there are many people who share it. It’s not quite on the same level as “Smith” in the west. But it’s high up there. Coupled with an almost stereotypically common first name in Portuguese, there are probably thousands of us.
I don’t hate it. I used to. In fact being the only kid with a weird name in a rural high-school on the Canadian prairies, I quickly anglicised my first name by dropping the “o” from Paulo to Paul. I somewhat regret that, but what’s done is done. It’s been so long now, adding the “o” back would be weird for everyone.
After a decades-long detour as 'Justin Louis, Luis Ferreira now just inserts an ‘O’.
Never too late!