I Choose To Call Myself William Gboms

You know how they say Elephants never forget? My friends call me an Elephant when I remind them of things that happened in the past(or are they trying to subtly tell me I'm fat? I know a guy who once called me 'Baby Elephant'. I thought it was cute at the time 'cos baby Elephants are cute, right? Hmm, food for thought).




 In Secondary School, I was a member of the Literary & Debating Society/Club and part of the select debating team for the President's Intercollegiate Debate Among Unity Schools In Nigeria in 2002 & 2003 before graduating.(Does this competition still hold? In my time we took the first position in the Regionals and 2nd position in the Nationals for both years. Yay! Big shout-out to Mrs Asuzu & Mrs Ononye.) During one of the regionals, there was this guy from another School's team who I'm almost sure anyone who was present will remember.

When it was his turn to speak, he mounted the podium, took the microphone from it's stand, adjusted his glasses(which we also noted he did like every 30 seconds) and with an unbelievably baritone voice said "I choose to call myself William Gboms". Never mind that we later got to know that his name is actually William Azubuike. What we all heard was William Gboms and from that day, it became his name as far as any of us were concerned. We mimicked him a lot, complete with imaginary glasses for those of us who didn't have.

What does this tell you? People will call you what you call yourself ...most of the time. 

My name is Theresa, but all my life people have been butchering the name without batting an eyelid! Tayriza, Tirayza, Tayrayza and some short versions - Tayray, Tayri-Tayri, Tay-Tay etc and in some cases, the R is replaced with an L - Tayliza, Tayli-Tayli and so on. One of the Corp members posted to my Secondary School at the time, had his own version 'Tue-rizey' and of course, my classmates started calling me that. Yikes! To appoint me to read a passage from my English Textbook, he'd go "Tue-rizey, can we have you?" in a particularly funny sing-song accent. Do I need to tell you it became a standing joke?

On leaving Secondary School, I decided to do something about the mispronunciation of my name. I started introducing myself as Tessy in University and that caught on.

I got my first major job and decided to use Tess instead and again, it caught on.

I changed jobs, and decided to become Tessa and yet again, it caught on.

And now, I've decided to go back to just Tess. LOL. I hope it catches on again.

So, don't be surprised when you hear people call me Tessy, Tessa, Tess or various pronunciations of Theresa(for those that have refused to get with the program *side eye*). They are all me. 

Yes, I choose to call myself Tess now. However, if you insist on addressing me as Theresa, please note the correct pronunciation of my own Theresa(I'm aware different countries say it differently). The phonetic transcription is |ter-EE-suh| (Click on it to hear it) It's actually ridiculous that when I pronounce my name correctly, most people don't get it until I follow up with "like Mother Teresa" and then I literally see the light bulb come on. When I get married though and decide to change my surname, I think  I'll be changing my first name too. Perhaps to a non-letter-T-starting version like Reesa or Reese ...like Reese Witherspoon. Cute eh? Maybe even something entirely unrelated like Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock. Why shouldn't I? When there are people who went from Ekenma to Kelly or Chukwuebuka to Chuks/Chuck. After the name-change, if you call me Theresa(however you pronounce it) you'll answer to me!






So, what do you choose to call yourself? ...and what do people choose to call you?



Do; a Deer, a female Deer
Re; a drop of golden Sun
Mi; a name I call myself...


Who wants to watch The Sound Of Music again?


xoxo...