A great many people here have two names. The one their parents gave them, and the one they use. Sometimes the second was chosen by a teacher. Sometimes by the person themselves, at an age at which nobody should be making that decision.
It sounds like a small thing and it’s frequently not.
What the choosing was actually about
Usually not preference. Usually the accumulation of a name being mispronounced daily, being visibly difficult for other people, becoming a joke, or producing a small pause at every roll call.
Children are efficient about this. Presented with a thing that generates friction every day, they remove it. The decision to become Kevin or Jenny is rarely a decision about identity; it’s a solution to a practical problem, made by someone too young to weigh what they were trading.
The cost shows up later — often much later, sometimes in a therapy room in someone’s thirties.
The particular losses
Your parents named you something. Frequently with care, sometimes with meaning attached — a generational character, a virtue, a grandparent. Setting it aside is a small severance, and parents frequently feel it even when they were the ones who suggested it.
Two names, two selves. Being one person at home and another everywhere else, from the age of six. That is code-switching installed at the level of what you are called.
The correction you stopped making. Most people give up on correcting pronunciation, and then hear their own name said wrong for twenty years by people who like them.
The hiring evidence. Worth mentioning because it’s frequently dismissed as paranoia: audit studies have repeatedly found that identical résumés with names read as foreign receive fewer callbacks. The instinct to anglicise is a response to something real.
Reclaiming it, if you want to
A number of people do this in adulthood, and it’s more common than it was.
It’s allowed to be partial. Your name at work and a different one with old friends. Your name in some contexts. There’s no requirement to convert everyone.
Expect it to be awkward. People who have known you for a decade will get it wrong for months. That’s friction rather than rejection, and it passes.
Teach the pronunciation once, plainly. Most people want to get it right and are embarrassed to ask. A short, unembarrassed correction works considerably better than either resignation or apology.
And you’re allowed not to. Some people are genuinely attached to the name they chose, or have built a life under it, or simply don’t want the project. That isn’t assimilation or self-erasure; it’s a name.
The thing worth noticing
The distress, where there’s any, is rarely about the syllables. It’s usually about having learned, very early, that a part of you created difficulty for other people and was therefore best removed.
That lesson tends to have been applied to more than the name, and it’s the more useful thing to look at.