I use lowercase letters for my name

I'll come right out and say it: I don't want a name. I don't want to be a proper noun. No name has ever felt like it was mine. The closest I've come is my current name, silviana amethyst.

I recently changed the casing of my name in the UWEC system to be lowercase to reflect this. And yes, it still appears with a leading uppercase letter in many places -- I'm not in control of those places.

But using lowercase letters isn't quite comfortable to me, either. It makes it unclear that my name is a name, I guess. Like, using leading capitals makes it easier to spot names on a page, and I think I like that. Relatedly, I use sentence case, not title case, for sections and whatnot in my writings, because otherwise it's hard to tell which words represent proper nouns. So maybe I should use capitals for my s and my a.

It started as a way to investigate how systems were mangling or managing people's names at conferences. I'd see conference badges, and wonder what kinds of processing they're doing before printing. And I quickly found that many conferences automatically capitalize people's names. As if I can't type my own name correctly, ugh. Like, by all means strip spaces from my name before printing so I don't cause stupid sizing or alignment issues. But don't capitalize my name.

An upsetting naming system I've encountered was at Colorado State University, my alma mater. I hold three degrees from CSU, none of which are in my current name. This some times causes issues for me. But their system won't let me get all lowercase letters for my name. So I still don't have a correct PhD degree. I guess it would sit in a box in my basement store room anyway.

The other stupid name system I interact with on a regular basis is at UWEC. Their system cannot express mononyms. People literally have to have a last name. I used to have a coworker without a last name, and the university's solution was to make their last name a period. Yep. So when I saw them in the directory (all the time), I would see "., Firstname". Wow. Terrible.

Names are complicated. I don't want one, but I have to have one. I don't want to be a proper noun, but I am one. I don't want to exist, and I certainly don't think I have a right to exist, but I do.