This week, starting March 6th, is National Celebrate Your Name Week.
My name is Sylvia, and I am one of the spring interns here with Kentucky Taste Buds. Tam and Leigh sent out an email earlier last week asking us to choose topics to write about for the upcoming month of March. The second that I saw it was Celebrate Your Name Week, I knew instantly that it was what I wanted to write about.
My name is definitely on the more unique side, but I would not have it any other way. Nothing warms my heart more when I introduce myself for the first time and someone says, “Sylvia? That is such a beautiful name!” I love it when my friends call me Syl or Sylv too, it just makes me feel special and incredibly loved. However, I didn’t always love my name as much as I do today. I remember when I was much younger, people would sometimes make fun of me for my name. Kids would say things like, “Your name is Sylvia? That is my great-grandma’s name. It’s so old.” Looking back, it was silly of me to let comments like that hurt my feelings, but I just wanted to fit in and have a name that other kids knew. I would go home after school and tell my mom that people don’t like my name, and she would always tell me that they don’t like it because it’s different, not because it is a bad name.
Fast forward to today, my name is truly one of my favorite things about myself. The uniqueness of it makes me feel special in the best way possible, and I am so grateful my parents decided to step out of the box when it came to choosing what to call me. My mom’s entire side of the family is from Switzerland, so my parents knew that they wanted a German name that my Swiss relatives could pronounce. When they came across the name Sylvia, they instantly knew it was the one. That being said, I choose to celebrate my name not just this week, but each and every single day. To me, it is more than six letters that people put together and refer to me as- it is a part of me and a part of my story.
So if you are reading this, here’s to you and your name this week! Whether you have a common name that everyone knows or a name that no one has ever heard of, you deserve to celebrate it because it is part of who you are. And a special shout-out to the people who constantly get their names mispronounced or spelled wrong, I know how that goes!