Posted on 2026.02.01
For more than half my life, I’ve lived with a secret identity.
Jillian.
She answers emails. She fields bookings. She has opinions about lighting, tone, logistics, and punctuality. She knows which hotels have the worst elevators and which drivers bring snacks. She signs off on things. She is, in many ways, very real.
But she isn’t my passport name.
So imagine the comedy of taking a three-week trip across southern Africa—South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana—with a tour group of fifteen people… and discovering that two of the other women on the trip were also named Jillian.
Not stage names. Not aliases. Real-life, government-issued, born-and-christened Jillians. It’s a common name in the U.K. it seems.
And me, traveling under my actual passport name, quietly carrying this second life in my back pocket like a burner phone I never turned off.
We covered over 5,500 kilometres together.
Game drives. Dusty roads. Border crossings. Early mornings. Long vans. Too many snacks. Too much sunscreen. The kind of trip where everyone starts off as strangers and ends up knowing who snores, who always needs a bathroom break, and who can’t find their sunglasses because they’re on their head.
Fifteen people. Three Jillians.
Only two of them knew they were Jillian.
Every time someone in the group called out, “Jillian!”—which happened constantly, because there were two of them—my nervous system would fire like a trained reflex. Years of answering to that name meant I turned my head automatically. Instantly. Without thinking.
“Jillian, do you have the room key?”
I turn.
“Jillian, can you pass the water?”
I turn.
“Jillian, we’re leaving in five!”
I turn again.
And then I’d remember:
Oh right. Not me. Not here. Not on this passport.
The real Jillians started to notice. At first it was just a glance. Then a laugh. Then full-on group amusement.
“You respond every time someone says Jillian,” one of them finally said.
I shrugged and whispered to myself “Occupational hazard.”
There’s something surreal about carrying a name for so long that it becomes a reflex, even when it isn’t technically yours in that moment. Jillian has been my armour, my persona, my professional skin for years. She’s the one who navigates chaos. She’s the one who answers at all hours. She’s the one who keeps things moving.
And apparently, she’s also the one who turns her head in the middle of the Okavango Delta when someone calls out across a safari truck.
By the time we hit Botswana, it became a running joke.
“Jillian!”
Three heads would turn. Mine included. Every time.
I never corrected it too deeply. The two actual Jillians knew me by my passport name. The rest of the group just thought I was unusually attentive. Which, to be fair, I am. When you spend years responding to a name on phones, texts, emails, and across hotel lobbies, it wires itself into your bones.
Fifteen people.
Three weeks.
5,500 kilometres.
Countless “Jillian!” echoes across lodges, buses, and dusty parking lots.
And every single time, I responded.
Because when you’ve spent over half your life as someone else—even a version of yourself—you don’t just turn it off when you go on vacation. That identity travels with you. It sits beside you on long drives. It looks out at the same landscapes. It turns its head when called, even if the call isn’t technically meant for you.
Somewhere between South Africa and Zimbabwe, I realized something quietly funny and strangely comforting: Jillian isn’t just a name I use. She’s a reflex. A companion. A parallel version of me that shows up whether I invite her or not.
So there we were—three Jillians crossing southern Africa together.
Two by birth.
One by life.
And one very confused tour group who couldn’t understand why I kept answering every time someone called that name.
