“My first name is tragic, even my mother never uses it”

Not liking your first name is one thing. Seeing that his parents, who chose him, don’t like him that much either is another. This is what happens in one family, with a woman explaining that no one calls her by her first name and instead uses her middle name. “I go by my middle name. I always have”she says on Reddit, asking Internet users to confirm that her first name is indeed “a tragedy”.

A first name created from scratch

“I think even my mother wasn’t so confident about the monstrous first name she created for me.”, indicates this user, who is originally from the ABC Islands, also called “Lesser Netherlands Antilles”. His mother came up with his first name by taking “an” from the first name of his own mother, Mary Ann, and the first name of his father Jan, “the Dutch version of John” (or Jean in French). She combined them and it gave the first name Anjanine. “It’s supposed to be pronounced like the first name Anne and the first name Janine put together, but absolutely no one can guess that by looking at it.”, she explains. While some forum members said they didn’t understand how some people didn’t know how to say it, she responded: “I had these: Angina (like the disease [angine en français, ndlr]), Anna-Jean, Ahn-Jah-Nin, Anna-Yin, Anna-Gina, Anna-Yanie, Anya-Nine and many others that I have forgotten.”

No one uses his first name, not even his mother who invented it.

This woman doesn’t like her first name, but she explains that it’s not her decision that no one uses it and instead calls her by her middle name. It was his mother who decided that it would be like this, even though she was the one who invented his first name! “I didn’t choose to be called by my middle name, which is Vanessa, it’s because of my mother. She loved it more but wanted to honor her parents with the first name.”she says. Which makes you wonder why she didn’t put Anjanine second, which her daughter would have preferred: “I sure wish she had honored them with my middle name.”