Metamorphosis of Identity: Signatures, Names, and Reinvention

Navigating the Bureaucratic Labyrinth

A couple weeks back, I signed closing papers for a small SBA loan to finish post-Hurricane Ida (August 2021) repairs on my property. The man I met with said he averaged a dozen closings a day. That volume of activity has me thinking about the many thousands of us inching along the same path. Bureaucracy is a great leveler, designed to fit us into standard categories. On the downside, we each become numbers. Hard to feel special at such scale, just when we could use a little customized TLC after being hit literally where we live.

Fluidity in Identity: The Dichotomy of Official and Personal

It’s said that our society lacks rites of passage to mark the transition between stages of life. Perhaps that’s why, in adulthood, we tend to view identity as fairly constant. But it is in fact quite plastic and elastic, especially as we age and even more when we face major, unpredictable and disruptive events that tear us away from regular life. Yet we go along, still affixing the same signatures to documents like the loan papers. Well, maybe not exactly the same, as described below. So there’s a split between official identity and far more nuanced personal experience. And who are we now, when we’re at home in those houses still in need of repair?

The Evolution of Names: A Symphony of Signatures

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus said we can’t step into the same river twice. We change and so does the river. Social customs and expectations shift as well. Women’s identities have been especially fluid; until very recently it was taken for granted that we’d give up our own names and assume our husbands’. Mine left it up to me. I kept my birth last name as middle, but without a hyphen. Still a large part of my sense of myself and it connected with my professional identity too. And that’s the signature I use on documents like the loan papers. With the shorter version, just my first and his last, I also liked the alliteration of the two “j’s.”

Rites of Passage and the Ever-Changing River

Our biggest transition, adolescent to young adult, is a time of reinvention and rebellion, stepping out of parental visions of who we are and into self-discovery. Native Americans often had robust rites of passage and did much better with transitions. Vision quests opened space for individual transformation, from provisional birth names to discovery of the real and true in young adulthood. I imagine gender-crossing processes, done with sufficient support, allow for similar personal discovery. And I wonder how it might work if we were a little more flexible, didn’t cling so tightly to official identity and allowed for periodic shifts. But that would probably require a hard to achieve level of trust in our mobile society. I have my own experience with legal name change, which I think of more as reclaiming. According to the family story, my mother anticipated having another boy, so when I arrived instead, she didn’t have a girl’s name ready. But then the priest wouldn’t baptize me with the one she chose, and I ended up by default with my grandmother’s name, which I hated. Not that I hated my grandmother, whom I never knew. Though I might work up a little resentment against the priest, if what mother said was accurate. Who made him the arbiter? At home, I was called by a nickname of what would have been my name. All sounds like a fairytale, doesn’t it? One of those where the hero/heroine is rediscovered, revealed, named. Perhaps that’s where my interest in stories began. Oh, and this time, as you’ll notice, I did insert a hyphen.

The Art of Reinvention: Signatures, Nicknames, and Legal Shifts

Back when I made my decision, I assumed I was unusual, rare. But not so, the lawyer I consulted said. I had to attest I was not changing to duck out of debts or other obligations. There’s that level of trust thing. Since then, I keep discovering both men and women who’ve recalibrated or even discarded birth names. Mostly, they’ve acted for professional reasons and around professional names. Easy, no paperwork involved, the face shown to the world, while the legal name can keep ticking along in the background and trotted out as needed. Like for signing loan documents. Marilyn Monroe was Norma Jean DiMaggio when married to the famous slugger. Andy Warhol, famous of his “15 minutes of fame” comment, shortened his last name. Ralph Lauren shifted from his original. A preppy name made it much easier to sell preppy clothes.

And so, I understand the impulse to reinvent. For me, carrying through cost a little time and money. And it felt right from the very beginning, that I’d come home to myself.