I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. My parents immigrated to the U.S. 4 or 5 years before I was born. Growing up in the Midwest, I was different than a lot of the people around me in school. We had White teachers and classmates and there was definitely a sense of “I’m not quite like everyone else.” I grew up with a lot of Indian people in my life who all called me Yaminee. When I went to school, I was called a kind of Americanized pronunciation. I was very passive in making any corrections so I just kind of allowed it and that became my name. When I was 10 years old, I moved to Ohio. In middle school was the first moment that somebody called me “Yam.” I hated that somebody called me something that I didn’t ask them to. Later on in high school, somebody casually called me “Yam” and I thought, “I don’t hate that explicitly anymore…maybe I can make this something that is my own.” It was the first time that I had owned my own identity. I didn’t want people to mispronounce my name anymore. I think it started to fit who I was and my personality. I wanted to be just friendly, a happy, go-lucky person and I think that nickname really encompassed who I wanted to be for a long time. I started to gain a sense of confidence and that was around the time I really started embracing my nickname.

I moved here and didn’t know anybody, but it gave me more room to breathe. Because there is so much diversity in Seattle, people have a lot of conversations on embracing identity and this was the first time I’d had to confront any of those feelings before. I was having a melding of personalities where the freedom of “Yam” started to come to this formalness of being an adult. I started having a lot of questions within myself on culturally, who am I? I am very far away from my family. If I want to be immersed in Indian culture, that decision is fully mine. This was the first time that I had to really have that discussion with myself and I wanted to start reincorporating “Yaminee” as an option for people. I started to have more discussions on who who I am in terms of being Indian. I think “Yam” provides me a safe defense of saying I am from America, a more Americanized version, as a warning to people that I wouldn’t necessarily know everything about India because I am from here. I’m not in a place to represent and that’s something that I hold a lot of shame in. The dichotomy between where I sit in my Indian voice and my Americanness has always been a fraught relationship. I think in certain situations, I want to be more Indian and in other cases, I want to hide that and I want to just be seen as me. As far as my name goes, I think saying “Yaminee, but you can call me Yam” is probably going to be where I sit for a long time. I don’t think I see a future where I pick one or the other, but I think I am getting more at peace with being both and having both of those things be part of my identity and who I am and just being more sure in that.