I have always loved hearing my mom tell the story of how when she named me Camille, she absolutely did NOT want me to have a nickname. I was to be baby Camille, not Cam, Cami, Milley or anything of the sort. She tells me that I was Camille and only Camille until my Aunt Patti started calling me Cami when I was a toddler and it caught on like a wildfire my mother could no longer control. My cousins, aunts, uncles and pretty soon Brooke and Ian picked up on the convenience of dropping off a few letters. Even though it's actually not much of a shortening since it has the same amount of syllables, before long, the only name I ever answered to was Cami. I'm not sure exactly when my mom crossed over to the other side, but she did and throughout my whole childhood my father was the only person in the world who ever called me by the name given to me at birth.
It was on the first day of my junior year of high school that a fairly close friend of mine found out that Cami was actually my nickname. I remember how confused he was on that first day of algebra 2 when the teacher was taking roll and I raised my hand when she called out Camille. "It's Cami," I said and then smiled at my friend who was staring at me as if I had lied and betrayed him for years. The truth was, the only time anyone heard my real name was at the beginning of every school year when the teacher would read my name off the list. Unlike some of the kids in my class who were humiliated by the teachers' butchering of their name, I never minded the proclamation of my secret "real" name out loud.
I have always liked the name Camille and as I got older, I began to feel like it suited me more. College seemed like the perfect time to reclaim the name my mother had intended for me but I knew it wasn't going to be easy since I went away to college and lived in the dorms with my best friend since elementary school who had never once called me Camille in the entire 12+ years we had known each other. She would pretty much flinch when I introduced myself to the people living down the hall as Camille so it's no surprise that my other housemates followed her lead and called me Cami regardless of what I said. But I had already made up my mind about reinventing myself in college and other than those in my immediate proximity, my college friends came to know me as Camille.
Fast forward 6 years and now my friends get a total kick out hearing my family members call me Cami. I am Camille to them and Cami seems like a cute pet name or something to be used used only by those who know me very very well. My high school friends, plus my other roomies in college, on the other hand, find it extremely difficult to address me as Camille. To them, no matter what it says on my voice mail recording, I am and always will be Cami.
For me, I am and always will be me. The name someone chooses to call me simply says something about the period of my life that they came into the picture. I like that and I don't want anyone to call me something other than what they know to be my name.
*Side Note Fun Fact: Camille, when said as I normally say it, sounds exactly like the Swedish word for camel. I have gotten some pretty funny looks from the Swedes when I introduce myself and say to them in Swedish "Hi, nice to meet you. My name is camel." I'm working on a more Swedish pronunciation to avoid such desert animal confusion.
2 comments:
You'll always be Cami to me. Cami is the girl I went swimming with in the rain on her birthday, and who I painted an entire kitchen yellow with, and whose car I was in when we overheated and had to pull off the road and fill the backseat with jugs of water to make the trip home. Camille is probably pretty awesome too, but you're Cami to me. :)
Great Post CAMI.
We are going through this with Jenna. I call her Jenny, but it hasn't stuck with everyone else yet.
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