It’s a situation that can create a sort of constant impostor syndrome
Photo: Michael Cogliantry/Getty Images For years growing up, I was constantly frustrated by my name: It was constantly misspelled and mispronounced. It never appeared on any of those key chains or toothbrushes that Ashleys and Sarahs and regular Carries could buy at souvenir shops. And worst of all, it looked a lot like “Carl,” leading to a handful of humiliating moments involving substitute teachers taking attendance.
And it really will, at least in the eyes of everyone around you. We attach significant meaning to names when forming impressions, says psychologist Adam Alter, a marketing professor at NYU who’s studied people’s name preferences. He offers up an extreme hypothetical case: Say “one set of parents named their children Yes and No,” he says. “Imagine having to present yourself as Yes versus No for your childhood, adolescence, and then into adulthood.
Either way, it’s a situation that can create a sort of constant impostor syndrome. That was the case for journalist Anneli Star Jocelyn Rufus, born Sharon Joy Rufus, who changed her name in her 20s after decades of feeling like her given one was all wrong. “It had a weird mushy sound to me. It sounded like a person eating wet cereal,” she says. “If I had better self-esteem, I would have perhaps had a better image of it. But to walk around with that, it just felt like being an impostor.
One 2015 study even found that people look like their names: When participants saw a photo of a stranger and were asked to guess the person’s name from a list of choices, they picked the right one at a rate significantly higher than chance.
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