My name is Damè. Always has been.

Nice to meet you... again.

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For the last thirty-odd years, I’ve introduced myself as Damian. In emails, on LinkedIn, in meetings, on business cards. Damian. A perfectly fine name. Just not mine.

My name is Dame — spelled Damè in English if you want to be pedantic about it. Pronounced Da as in the Slavic word for “yes,” and Me as in “meh.” Two syllables. Simple, actually, once you hear it once.

But when you’re eleven years old, standing in a classroom in western Sydney, and every kid in earshot hears “Dame” and immediately pivots to Dame Edna jokes — simple doesn’t feel simple at all. It feels like a target painted on your school shirt.

The year 5 pivot

I was in Year 5 when I made the switch. I don’t remember it as a single dramatic moment. It was more like erosion. A slow wearing down. The giggles, the put-on falsetto voices, the exaggerated curtsy in the playground. None of it was cruel in the way adults understand cruelty. It was just relentless in the way only kids can be.

So I picked Damian. Close enough to feel like mine, far enough from Dame Edna to give me some peace. And it worked. The jokes stopped. The teachers updated their rolls. Life moved on.

I never legally changed my name. I never filled out a deed poll or stood before a magistrate. On every piece of government paperwork, every passport, every official document — I’ve always been Dame. The person the tax office knows and the person my colleagues know have never quite been the same person.

The long middle

Here’s the strange thing about a workaround you adopt at eleven: it just... persists. You don’t revisit it at fifteen, or twenty-one, or thirty. It becomes the water you swim in. Damian is what your work email says. Damian is what the barista writes on the cup. Damian is who picks up the phone in a client call.

Meanwhile, everyone who actually knows you — your family, your oldest friends, the people who’ve seen you at your worst and your best — they call you Dame. They always have. There’s never been any confusion for them.

So you end up living with this quiet split. Your professional self carries one name and your actual self carries another, and for years that gap doesn’t bother you because you barely notice it’s there.

Until one day, somewhere in your forties, you do notice. And once you notice, you can’t stop noticing.

The question I keep circling

At what point do you just... switch back?

I’m not twenty-two and starting fresh. I have a career, a professional network, clients who’ve known me as Damian for years. There’s a digital trail of that name stretching back decades. It’s on my LinkedIn, my email signature, every conference lanyard I’ve ever worn.

And yet — it’s not my name. It never was. It was a shield a kid built because he didn’t have the tools to say, “Actually, it’s pronounced like this, and no, it’s got nothing to do with Dame Edna, and could we all just move on?”

I have those tools now. I’ve had them for a long time. I just haven’t used them.

Is this a rebrand?

I’ve been turning this question over: is going back to Dame a kind of personal rebrand? I think the honest answer is — no. A rebrand implies you’re becoming something new. This is closer to the opposite. It’s removing a layer that was never supposed to be permanent.

If anything, Damian was the brand. A carefully chosen alias that smoothed over something the world found awkward. Dame is just... me. The original product, if you want to be crass about it.

But I’d be lying if I said the mechanics aren’t similar. There’s the practicalities — updating profiles, telling colleagues, weathering the inevitable “wait, what?” in meetings. There’s the internal question of how much explanation you owe people. (My current theory: very little. “I’m going by my actual name now” is a complete sentence.)

And there’s the vulnerability of it. Choosing Damian at eleven was, in its own small way, an act of self-protection. Choosing Dame at forty-something is an act of something else. Trust, maybe. Or just tiredness. I’m tired of answering to a name that isn’t mine.

How do you reintroduce yourself?

I don’t think there’s a graceful playbook for this. You can’t send a company-wide memo. You can’t do a dramatic reveal. You just... start.

You update your email signature. You correct people gently when they use the old name. You sit with the brief awkwardness of someone saying “Oh, I didn’t know!” and you say, “No reason you would have. Now you do.”

Some people will get it immediately. Some people will slip up for months. Some people will ask you to explain the pronunciation three times. That’s fine. Eleven-year-old me couldn’t handle that. Forty-something me can.

The people who already call me Dame won’t notice a thing. They’ve been ahead of me on this the whole time.

So, hello

My name is Damè. Two syllables. Da-me. It’s the name my parents gave me, the name on my birth certificate, the name the people closest to me have never stopped using.

For a long time, I let the world talk me out of it. I’m done doing that.

It’s nice to meet you. Again.