My Name Is

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I was told that my name represents the love story of my parents. I am the eldest so that was why the idea to combine their name, which came from my father, materialize for the first born in the family. 
True enough, Nazida is a combination of Naz (my father’s name) and Ida (my mother’s name). Nur was added at the beginning because it means ‘the light’ in Arabic. Here in Malaysia, the majority of the citizens are Muslims so it is common for us to adopt names that have meanings in Arabic.

All my other siblings have names mentioned in the Book of Baby’s Name Recommended in Islam so their names have actual meanings in Arabic. This used to annoy me when I was growing up because their names have meanings but I did not know what my name represents, apart from being the love story of my parents. I think that my name has no meaning at all, even though I am still trying to find any similar Arabic words that might be an exemplar.
During high school, there were more than three students with the name of Zida (what my friends call me). So I was annoyed and told my father one day. He responded by saying, “But did you find anybody with the exact name as yours in full? You couldn’t right?” He was right and still is.
Since my name is created based on my parents’ name, you could not find another name similar to mine. Try googling it! Yet, my siblings have duplicates everywhere and sometimes find people with the exact similarity with theirs. This has caused problem of course especially when they are studying because marks can be wrongly given to the wrong person.


 
Since I have been living with this name since I was born, I grow to love Nurnazida although I only use Zieda as my pen name. My full name is a tongue twister to pronounce especially to those who are not from the same country as mine. When I was studying in Melbourne, my professors would just pronounce Nur whenever they wanted me to answer questions or to return my papers. I would just ignore their callings since Nur is a common name in Malaysia so I thought they were actually calling another one of my classmates.

So many funny incidents happened because of this. Usually, when they had been trying to call few times but to no avail, they would start to pronounce the full name. Angrily. That was when I would quickly respond and apologized because I really thought that they were calling somebody else, hahaha.♡

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