Do roses have preferred names???
On legal names, lived identities, and bureaucratic dysphoria
This spring, I've been in NYC courts doing paperwork to make my 'personal branding' as Aliza officially official. There are two reasons I'm doing this now (instead of like... decades ago) and I wish that they were both joyous reasons: 1) I'm getting remarried and changing parts of my name anyways (yay!) 2) I'm done explaining my preferred name professionally (cringe!)
The name mismatch
Since my first day of life, my lived experience has been in contextually "mixed" settings where families like mine negotiate two naming playbooks across five languages. But as an adult, I have to survive 'professional' America. Seriously, 37% of Americans use "nicknames" per US Census data, and that includes US public figures.
At work, the same systems that effortlessly process "Kate" to "Catherine" and "Beto" to "Robert" sometimes short-circuited at my "weirdness".
The Weirdness:
(My hippie mom's awkward peace offering to my father's traditionalism)
+
My lived experience in Jewish and now Muslim spaces
(Yeah... the name was pretty but incongruous with my lived experience)
The professional toll
In the beige, names-as-barcodes world, this combo has resulted in my missing contracts and promotions when people are innately suspicious of the 'complicated'/'weird' person.
Thankfully, for years I worked in spaces where multilingual naming conventions were treated like custom QR codes, scannable in any context, with layers of meaning beneath the surface. Colleagues could answer interchangeably to examples like Yiddish "Moishe", Russian "Misha", Arabic "Abu Amir", and legal "Michael [Last Name]" without blinking. Payroll needed our Social Security numbers; the rest of us only needed to listen well enough to recognize the person behind the variations.
Home mirrors this fluency — we speak two languages daily, moving between cultures where identity has always been modular by necessity. A name might shift registers between government forms, family WhatsApp groups, and customer service calls, but the person remains the same.
The breaking point(s)
My NYC multilingual professional era (freelancing in successful SMB non-startups) started a decade ago, after a startup (Series A, with a core team that was as beige as unseasoned chicken) fired me suspiciously fast post-Pesach PTO request when my professional/legal name didn't match their assumptions about my personal life.
Respecting the beige demand for decorum and work/personal life compartments wasn't working for me in NYC. So, I ditched the decorum of a 'professional/personal' name divide and I started politely demanding my 'preferred' name everywhere.
But the 2025 straws that broke the camel's back?
Those included middle school level bullying at one temp job site, and a random recruiter sneering "I'll just call you by your real name" (🤮!).
This made me realize: the paperwork tied to my marital joy also needed to be paperwork to end the conflicting identity vs experience ASAP. People are stressed and stretched thin in this crazy economy and some people use any excuse to show their worst self when they think that they are in a position of power. And tbh the people acting like that are weirder and more off-putting than someone whose life is simply the result of a blended household.
To those who get it
To those who've always used my name right: Thank you!
I will always answer to a plethora of nicknames and accept new ones given with warmth!
Shoutout to the people who catch my name's ע/ع on the phone and share a moment of solidarity!
To the name gatekeepers
Don't you have bigger problems than the CX lady's identity?? For my father's sake, I apologize for somehow forcing you to waste braincells on being an unprofessional bully instead of doing your actual job.
I'm gonna keep being Aliza casually and legally, TIA. I'm keeping my same operational brilliance, now with 100% less bureaucratic dysphoria. Maybe this will help me run into less 'people like you' shade from the unseasoned chickens of the workplace, but time will tell because I'll still be 'weird' (aka, a neurodivergent woman with covered hair). 😏