There are some insults you remember years after everyone else has forgotten them.
For me, many of those memories are connected to one thing: my name.
I was 14 when a friend made a cruel joke about it during a school trip to Normandy. Five girls were sharing a room, and what should have been an exciting experience suddenly became another reminder of how uncomfortable I had become with something as fundamental as my own identity.
My friend made a crude joke about my name, Yashita, while another girl had just complimented me.
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t defend myself.
I simply shrugged and stayed quiet.
At that age, her approval still mattered to me. I knew she could be unpredictable, and I had learned that sometimes keeping quiet felt safer than challenging someone who had the power to turn against you.
But the comment hurt.
It was another reminder of the years I had spent hearing variations of the same joke.
My Name Was Never Just a Name
I grew up in a Mauritian family where having more than one name was not unusual.
At home, I was Neerma. My mother called me Mim.
At school, I was Yashita, the name that also appeared on my birth certificate.
When I moved to the UK before I was 10, I quickly discovered that people struggled to pronounce Neerma.
Rather than repeatedly asking people to learn it, I adapted.
I started using Yashita more often.
At the time, I didn’t think much about what I was giving up.
I was simply trying to make life easier.
But as I grew older, that adjustment became part of a much bigger pattern.
The Jokes Started to Change How I Saw Myself
The teasing wasn’t necessarily happening every single day.
That almost made it harder to explain.
There were enough ordinary days that I could tell myself it wasn’t serious. But there were also enough cruel moments that the comments slowly worked their way into how I viewed myself.
Some classmates turned my name into jokes and songs.
They would deliberately distort it and repeat the altered version around me while others laughed.
What might have seemed like harmless playground humour to them became something much more painful for me.
I began associating my name with embarrassment.
Instead of hearing my name and thinking about my family, culture or identity, I heard the punchline everyone else seemed to hear.
Even Adults Joined In
One of the experiences I remember most clearly happened during PE.
A teacher deliberately mispronounced my name while taking the register and laughed.
The class laughed too.
Then came the fake apology — repeating my real name in a mocking way.
When an adult joins in, the humiliation feels different.
A teacher is supposed to be someone who creates a safe environment. Instead, I felt as though the person in charge had confirmed to everyone else that I was an acceptable target.
The experience affected my relationship with PE long after that teacher was gone.
I wasn’t particularly confident at sports anyway, but I began looking for reasons not to participate.
Sometimes I would spend lessons in the medical room, claiming that I wasn’t feeling well.
It wasn’t really about PE.
It was about wanting to avoid another situation where my name could become entertainment for everyone else.
At 14, I Wanted a Different Name
Eventually, the accumulated embarrassment became too much.
I had an emotional conversation with my mother when I was 14 and asked about changing my name.
She didn’t dismiss me.
Instead, she told me that if I was certain, we could consider it.
The problem was that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to be called.
I only knew what I didn’t want.
I didn’t want to hear that name being twisted into another insult.
I didn’t want to feel ashamed when someone asked me to introduce myself.
And, most painfully, I didn’t want to feel like being myself was something that needed fixing.
I Nearly Let Them Decide Who I Was
Looking back, I realize that the bullying had done something more significant than hurt my feelings.
It had made me question my identity.
As a child, I hadn’t looked at my name through the cultural lens I would later develop.
I simply knew it belonged to me.
But repeated racist and culturally insensitive comments changed that.
I began seeing myself through the perspective of people who considered my name strange or funny.
That is one of the most damaging things about bullying.
The bully doesn’t have to convince you that they are right.
They only have to make you question yourself.
I Eventually Chose Not to Change It
In the end, I didn’t legally change my name.
Part of that decision came from a simple thought: I didn’t want the people who had bullied me to win.
They had already made me uncomfortable in my own skin.
I didn’t want them to take my name too.
When I went to university, I began using Yashi as an unofficial shortened version.
It was easier for people to say, and it gave me some distance from the experiences I associated with school.
I’ve continued using that shortened form professionally as a journalist.
But the decision not to erase my original name remains important to me.
Reclaiming a Name Can Mean Reclaiming Yourself
For years, I thought the problem was my name.
Now I understand that the problem was never the name.
It was the way other people treated something they didn’t understand.
Names carry family history, language, culture and memory. For people from immigrant and multicultural backgrounds, they can also become a point where different worlds collide.
Being asked how to pronounce your name isn’t necessarily offensive.
Making an effort to learn someone’s name is an act of basic respect.
Turning that name into a joke, particularly when someone repeatedly tells you it hurts them, is something entirely different.
I Don’t Want Another Child to Feel the Way I Did
The most important lesson I’ve taken from those years is that children shouldn’t have to make themselves smaller to make other people comfortable.
A child shouldn’t feel pressured to abandon a name because classmates can’t pronounce it.
They shouldn’t have to hide their culture to avoid becoming a target.
And teachers should never participate in humiliating a student because of their name.
I still remember the embarrassment.
But I also remember the choice I eventually made.
I could change my name because I wanted to.
Or I could change it because other people had convinced me there was something wrong with it.
Those are two very different decisions.
I chose the first option — and ultimately decided that my name was never the thing that needed changing.
