As any freshman (or once freshman) would understand, the first couple of weeks of college are filled with new faces and new names no matter what situation you find yourself in, be it at a party, in classes, or at your residence hall.
You soon recognize the routine conversation you have with all of these new faces: you learn their name, their major, and where they are from. You hope to find some sort of commonality in one of these three points of conversation, and who knows, you might end up making a friend.
But if you’re anything like me, getting past the first question is a conversation in its own right.
“Wait, can you say that again?”
“Am I saying it right? ‘Toe-loo?’”
“That’s an interesting name.”
To be completely frank, for the majority of the 19 years I have spent on this Earth, I have had a very solid love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with my name: Tolulope (Tolu for short).
I remember when I was in elementary school, after a long day of fourth grade, my mother knew something was wrong when she picked me up from school.
“Mom, why couldn’t you have named me Sam? Or Courtney? Or something that doesn’t take people 10 tries to get right? Mom, kids give me nick names like ‘tofu,’ and I hate it!”
I was ashamed of my name; I was scared that people wouldn’t want to be my friend because I was so different from everyone else. I believed that being one of the very few Nigerians with a funny name and slightly awkward accent was something to be ashamed of. Unfortunately, I carried this thought throughout my entire grade school career.
That day in the car, my mom told me something that I try to never forget. She told me that no one should ever make me feel like I should be ashamed of where I am from because of my name. She told me that “Tolulope” translates from one of the Nigerian languages to mean “Thanks be to God” in English.
“Now is that something that you should be ashamed of?” she said.
Some people are told to be ashamed of their name or disposition, and some are told to be ashamed of their past decisions. But if there’s one thing that my three semesters of college has taught me, it is that bad decisions and mistakes are inevitable—it’s college after all. The only thing we should be ashamed of is not learning from past experiences or making others feel ashamed of their own.
College is all about trying to figure out who you are in an entirely new environment where mistakes are going to be made and where someone will always have an opinion of your actions or disposition. The important thing you should remember is that you should not let it get to you. Things you cannot control and things you have done in the past cannot be changed in the present, therefore, you should learn from those experiences or find the good in the things you can’t change (like the cool meaning to that really weird name of yours).
So my name is Tolulope (Tolu) Salako. Not Toe-loo or Tay-Loo. It’s Tolu—and that’s something I’m not ashamed of. No matter how many times people call me “tofu” or “fruit loop” just to be funny, it’s not something that bugs me all too much today. So even if it takes you 10 times to pronounce my name correctly, I promise you’ll get it eventually. And I won’t be sorry about it anytime soon.
