Should I Use My Real Name or My English Name?

2026-10-05 · Yesterself

There was a first time. A roll call where the teacher stopped, looked up, and did the thing with her mouth. A first shift where the manager wrote something on a name tag that was not quite what you said. A phone interview where you heard the pause and filled it yourself, quickly, with the shorter one, and the conversation moved on and you were relieved.

Most people who use an easier version of their name can find that day if they go looking. It is worth going looking, because the decision you made in that half second has been running ever since, unreviewed, and it is probably time it got reviewed by an adult rather than by a fourteen-year-old trying to get through registration.

Write down the moment you started

Before you decide anything, reconstruct the scene. Not the general story you tell about it — the specific occasion.

Write for ten minutes and get these on paper:

• Where you were, how old you were, who else was in the room
• What the other person actually did — the pause, the laugh, the second attempt, the "can I just call you"
• Whether they offered the short name or you did
• What you felt in your body in that second
• What you told yourself afterward, if anything

That last one is usually load-bearing. Most people said something to themselves like it's easier this way or it's not a big deal. Write it down as close to the original wording as you can remember. You have been operating on it for years.

Then note who was not in the room. Often nobody who shared the name was present. The decision got made where the name had no allies.

The honest ledger: what it bought you

Skip the part where this is a tragedy. It was a trade, and you will not think clearly about the second column until you have been fair about the first. Write down what the easier name actually purchased, specifically and unembarrassed:

• Fewer repeats. Three syllables saved, forty times a day, for years.
• A first meeting that stayed on the subject instead of detouring into your ancestry.
• Not being the person who makes a stranger feel stupid.
• Not hearing the joke. You know the joke.
• A callback, possibly. You will never know which ones, and that uncertainty is its own weight.
• Distance. For some people the short name was a small piece of privacy — the family name kept out of a building that had not earned it.

That last one is real and often gets misread as shame. A name you protect is not the same as a name you are hiding.

The other column: what it cost

Now the same treatment on the other side. What you are looking for is not a general feeling but incidents.

• The moment someone from work met someone from home and both names were in the air at once.
• The half-second lag before you answer to the short one, or the newer version, where you do not lag at all anymore.
• The colleague of eight years who could not pronounce the name your mother uses, and never had to.
• The wedding, the funeral, the hospital form where the two names had to be reconciled by you, out loud, in front of people.
• The younger cousin who watched you do it and drew a conclusion.

Some people finish this list and find it short. That is a legitimate result — not everyone with an easier name is carrying an injury, and nothing is owed to anybody's idea of authenticity. Others notice the ledger stopped balancing years ago and was never renegotiated.

One distinction is worth writing down, because it separates two situations usually discussed as one. Did you choose the easier name, or was it assigned to you? A name you picked at nineteen because you liked it, and have used happily for a decade, is yours. That is a different object from a name a supervisor handed you because your own was inconvenient at the counter. When people ask should I use my real name or my English name, the honest answer usually depends entirely on which of those two things happened, and only you know.

Draft the sentence before you need it

If you take the given name back, the whole thing reduces to one sentence you will say maybe two hundred times. Write it now, in several versions, before you are standing in front of anyone.

Rules that make it easier to say:

1. Short. One line. The longer it gets, the more it sounds like a request.
2. No apology. Cut "sorry", "I know it's a pain", "if you don't mind". Those invite negotiation.
3. Include the sound. Give the pronunciation in the same breath, so nobody spends a month avoiding your name.
4. No reason attached. You do not owe the why, and offering one turns a statement into a case that can be argued with.
5. Present tense, already true. "I go by Nadia" beats "I'd like to start going by Nadia."

Write five versions and read them back the next day. You will hear immediately which ones flinch.

Then draft the follow-ups. The first sentence is the easy one.

• The second correction, three days later, to the same person. "Nadia, actually." Nothing more.
• The person who says "I'll never get that right." A friendly, flat "you will" beats reassuring them.
• The person who asks why now. "It's my name" is a complete answer.

Correcting people who have used the short version for ten years

Long habits are corrected by repetition plus paperwork, and the paperwork does most of the quiet work.

Change the things that say your name when you are not in the room: email display name, signature, chat handle, the internal directory, the byline. People read those more often than they listen to you. Where payroll or a legal record uses a different form, keep the two separate: what a system requires and what people call you are different questions, and that varies by country and employer.

Then accept a slow curve. Expect months, and both names in one conversation. Expect one person to need correcting more times than feels polite, and correct them anyway, without heat.

A few things that help:

• Tell two or three allies first and ask them to use it in meetings. Someone else's mouth teaches the room faster than yours.
• Give people a pronunciation they can reach. Decide in advance which approximation you accept, so you are correcting toward something.
• Let some rooms keep the old version. A mixed policy is not cowardice — full name at work, something else with a friend from 2009.

Keep dated entries through the first three months — two lines on the days it went badly and the days nobody noticed. Later you want the curve, not only the worst meeting. Old entries signed with the short name can stay as they are. Working out the name itself is a different exercise.

Briefly, on the tool. Yesterself is a journaling app that returns your own writing to you: each morning, one letter drawn from your past entries, and any sentence can be postmarked to a future date. Sending how is the name going forward ninety days is one way to check without relying on memory. It is not released yet, so there is nothing to download; the waiting list is all there is.

This is not medical, clinical, or legal advice. If reclaiming your name is tangled up with family estrangement, or with how you have been treated at work, someone qualified — a therapist, or for discrimination an employment lawyer in your jurisdiction — will be more use than a writing exercise.

What you are actually deciding

Not whether your name is hard. Names are hard only relative to a mouth, and every mouth is provincial about something.

You are deciding which version you want called across a room in ten years, and by whom. Write that as a scene: the room, the year, who is calling. Whichever name turns up when you write fast is the one worth two hundred corrections.

Common questions

Should I use my real name or my English name at work?

There is no single right answer, and the useful question is narrower. Ask whether you chose the easier name yourself or inherited it from somebody else's convenience, and whether you would be relieved or embarrassed to hear your given name said aloud in that room.

How do I correct someone who has used the short version for ten years?

Say it once, plainly, without explaining why. Something like this works, I am going back to my full name, it is pronounced this way. Then use it in your signature and your display name and let repetition do the rest of the work.

What if people keep getting the pronunciation wrong?

Decide in advance which approximation you can live with, since most people will land near it rather than on it. Correct the ones who are trying and let go of the ones who are not, and keep correcting for longer than feels polite.

Do I have to change it everywhere at once?

No. A mixed policy is a real choice, not a failure of nerve. Many people take the given name back at work and keep the short one with old friends who have used it for decades.

Is Yesterself available to download?

Not yet. Yesterself has not been released on the App Store or Google Play, so there is nothing to install. The waiting list on the site is the only way to hear when it is.