What happens when your name and identity clash
I’ve a secret: I’m not comfortable with my first name and have been thinking of changing it for years. Firstly, Nuala combined with Woulfe is hard to say; too many vowels and, since I’ve been a kid, I’ve been aware my name wasn’t straight forward. My Kerry cousins gave me the whole musical Nuallah, but in Dublin, where I grew up it was always Nula. I’ve spent my whole life spelling my surname [Woulfe] or seeing it written incorrectly, but lately, as my first name has fallen out of fashion, people are spelling my name as Nula, Noole and most remarkably, even Noodle.
Like most people who have an issue with their name, I’ve a back-up one, Katherine. When I was little, my mum called me Kitty as a pet name, I was aware that my name was Nuala, but I liked the Kitty one more, so I took Katherine as my confirmation name as a means to reconnect with that earlier identity. According to a 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “names convey personality characteristics from warmth to cheerfulness and easy to pronounce names are judged more positively than difficult to pronounce ones.”
