My Name

Originally published August 25, 2025

Names are a powerful thing. When you name something, you give it life. You give it feeling. You give it a persona. Names are an integral part of our lives, almost as old as spoken language is itself. Names, especially ones that we give to our children and our loved ones, are some of the most important words to come from spoken word. My name is the most important word to me.

When I was 15, my English 4 teacher, Dr. Connolly- or “Doc” as I called her, introduced me to Warsan Shire and her poetry. We studied “The Birth Name,” and it’s been something I’ve thought about everyday since. It goes like this:

“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”

My parents gave me a difficult name. Forgoing a middle, my full name is Willianny Reyes, and people have been pronouncing it wrong my entire life. To be honest, I don’t even pronounce it right. I googled it, which I’ve done before, and for the first time results actually came up. One website said that it doesn’t have any religious or cultural origins, but it’s most popular in Venezuela. It is Germanic, though, so it’s readily accessible for all kinds of groups and backgrounds. It’s pronounced like wih-lee-AH-nee, if you didn’t know.

My name has given me a lot of grief over the years. My family has called me Lilly since the day I was born. I have no idea why; I’ve asked, but there doesn’t really seem to be a reason. I like to compare it to when Williams get nicknamed Bill. By the way, my dad’s name is William, which is where I got my name from. Since I grew up with Lilly, most people in my life called me that up until about middle school. Then when I was thrown into a pool of new faces, my age or older, who didn’t know me at all, they didn’t call me Willianny or Lilly. They called me Willy.

I don’t know who or when this started, but it stuck for quite a few years. I liked it at first, but as I got older, I started to appreciate by birth given name more and more. I realized just how much people called me Willy as a scapegoat to avoid saying my real name, or because they just didn’t feel like it. It was never a sweet nickname given out of love; it was a short version called out of laziness. And of course, it’s not the case for everyone ever who called me Willy, but the more I used my first name, the more people heard the first half and thought can I call you Willy, instead? I’m never going to remember that.

No, you can’t call me Willy instead. You can call me Willianny, because that’s what I told you to call me. Names are chosen with care and consideration and caution and mine specifically was chosen especially for me, out of love, by the first people to ever love me. To think that not being decent enough to even attempt to pronounce my phonetic name will give you the allowance to shorten it, is to have no respect for me or the ground I stand on.

Have you ever met another Willianny? I can almost guarantee you haven’t. My name was pulled from the Earth by my parents and it gives me life. It’s who I am. It shapes introductions, conversations. Without a name, my name, I’m not really anyone. Don’t ask me if I have a nickname, don’t ask me to call me something else. Don’t tell me you’ll never remember, don’t tell me you won’t even try to pronounce that. Do you respect me? Do you understand me? If you can’t speak the first thing ever given to me when I first made it to Earth, then you shouldn’t speak to me at all. It’s my name. It’s my name. It’s my name. Say it right. Exactly how it’s spelled.

A new thing is people avoiding me or avoiding saying it because they don’t know how. Hey, have you tried asking? Does no one understand how weird that is? It’s the only way I can describe it when my name isn’t pronounced correctly or even attempted. It’s just plain weird. Weird behavior from weird people that don’t respect me, that I will never trust.

Warsan Shire’s poem has lived in my camera roll for almost five years now. I think of it every time someone asks me my name. My name is Willianny. Some of my favorite nicknames are Lilly, Will, even Lil Will, and sometimes William. Variations of my name given to me out of love and not out of disrespect. It might not seem important or disrespectful to some people, especially people with common or domestic names. My foreign name is “too hard to say,” but it’s pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. Not saying my name is not seeing me. It is really that serious. I have never forgotten a single time anyone has mispronounced it after I’ve explained it, and I never will. Those memories live in my brain, in the same space as Warsan when she says

My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”

With love, wih-lee-AH-nee