For the early part of my career, I went by Rebecca at work.
I did this deliberately, not in a “my legal name is Rebecca but I go by Becca” kind of way. I introduced myself as Rebecca. I signed emails from Rebecca. I had business cards printed that said Rebecca, and I loved them. I had a shorthand email sign off where I just wrote my initials, RKT to end a request. (Sheesh).
I thought it sounded older. More serious and sophisticated. More like a young woman someone would actually admire, and clients would respect.
Becca, I decided, sounded like a fun girl you’d grab a beer with. Rebecca sounded like a woman you’d put on a board.
I have a lot of compassion for that twenty-four-year-old now. She was doing the math so many women do, which is to say she was scanning the room to figure out what the room wanted. The room, she thought, wanted Rebecca. So she gave them Rebecca.
The sad thing is, that room wasn’t wrong. I was only twenty-four and trying to be taken seriously at serious tables by people two or three times my age with two or three times my experience, and Rebecca bought me a few inches of authority I hadn’t yet earned in any other way. Rebecca got me into some rooms I craved being in. Rebecca got listened to in those rooms. Rebecca was useful.
The thing about going by a name that isn’t quite yours is that you have to remember to answer to it. I would be in a meeting and someone would say “Rebecca?” and there might be a half-second delay before I clicked into character. Oh, right: Me. It’s pretty exhausting to be a person and also be playing a person at the same time. I wish someone had told me this.
“Becca” came back gradually. I don’t remember the exact day I decided to drop the formality, just that at some point I had stopped correcting people who called me Becca, and then I had started introducing myself as Becca, and then one day I noticed I had business cards with Rebecca on them in a box from my old job, and I threw them in the trash. I didn’t save even one. I have old copies of every other business card version.
I think maybe I’d become tired. I was tired of the gap between the woman I was claiming to be and the woman I actually was. Tired of the half-second delay. Tired of trying to be older than I was, when getting older was, as it turns out, happening on its own.
What I didn’t understand in my twenties, and what I think I’m only now beginning to, is that Rebecca was not the fang. She wasn’t a weapon I needed to put down in order to be soft. She was a costume — built by Becca, who was already sharp enough underneath to know she needed one.
I had the fang the whole time. Rebecca was just the part of it the room could see.
The fruit is in me too — the warmth, the laugh, the woman you’d grab a drink with after a hard day — and the room sees her now, because I stopped sorting myself into the parts the room could handle.
I get called Rebecca occasionally, still. By my aunts when they haven’t seen me in a while. By the eye doctor who used to live next door to us growing up. By people who knew me in the brief Rebecca work era and never updated their files. I don’t correct any of them. She is not wrong. She’s on my driver’s license, signs school forms, shows up on the mortgage. She got me here.
I just don’t need her in those rooms anymore.
If you are using a name that isn’t quite yours — at work, on social media, in the version of yourself you have agreed to be for someone else’s comfort — I have no real advice to offer, I just want to tell you that the version of you doing it is not a fraud. She’s a strategist. And one day you’ll find the business cards stashed in a drawer, and you’ll know she’s done her job. You’ll thank her, finally, for her smarts and her service. And then you’ll let her rest. That’s how you’ll know.
