my name often feels like the bane of my existence.

as you may have surmised, jen is of course, short for jennifer. it’s a name i’ve never felt suits me particularly well. it’s overly formal, stuffy, uptight. there’s just something about it which has always chafed, to the point where i’ve given serious consideration to actually changing it. it’s just not “me”, and as such has always felt like something of a burden to endure. there is also the additional annoyance of having a name as common as dirt. as an american girl child born in ‘72, i grew up with a whole phalanx of jennifers around me – jennifer was the single most popular girls name from 1970 – 1984, finally falling out of the top five only in 1989. that’s nearly 20 years, with 3-4 million births per year – it’s jennifer madness.

my family have never even called me jennifer – as a little kid i was jenny, and from about 11 years old onward, i’ve always been adamantly jen. i don’t call myself jennifer, i don’t introduce myself as jennifer, and i don’t answer to jennifer.

here in the uk though, there is a refreshing dearth of jennifers. i personally, in my four years here, have only met one or two others. and i’ve never met anyone who goes by jen – i’ve heard of mythical jennies, but not yet spotted one of these elusive creatures. and whilst i’m thrilled to not be constantly surrounded by a swarm of people with the same indistinguishable name, it still manages to cause me consternation, even here.

a typically british trait is that almost all names are shortened to some sort of nickname, but yet almost no one seems to intuit that jen is a diminution of jennifer. and consequently, they almost never get it right. i don’t introduce myself as jennifer because i don’t want people calling me that, but “jen” without the context of my longer name seems to cause inordinate amounts of confusion. i am continually called jan/jane/jean by work colleagues i’ve known now for several years. over the phone, i have to spell out j-e-n innumerable times. i get post addressed to “jan” even when they’re replying to a letter sent by me with my name right on it. i sign all my emails jen, but still some people insist on replying to “jennifer” (from my assigned work email address), or even jenny (infuriatingly childish) because jen just befuddles them. it’s as if three simple letters were the equivalent of that indecipherable symbol that prince used.

so whilst i’m no longer trying to individuate myself from a sea of jennifers, i’ve now got the opposite problem. whereas before there were far too many jennifers/gennifers/jenns/jennies/jennys, now there are too few. i might as well have a name like condoleeza, for all the grief it causes me, or the number of times i find myself repeating it over and over.

what name would i want? well i’ve always loved my middle name – noël (the traditional french spelling) – but honestly, you try getting identification, filling out forms, etc. with a name that has an umlaut in it.

and over here, where noel is a common boys name, that’d just be opening a whole different can of worms.

so i’ll stick with jen for the time being, but it certainly lends creedence to the old chestnut: be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

i’m from barcelona – jenny

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