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By a convenience of dates, I can today count in exact months how long I’ve spent in each of three phases of my life:
- A child, with my birth name: 216 months
- An adult, still with my birth name: 98 month
- An adult, now with my assumed name: 222 months
(I drew a pretty pie chart but a crash ate it.)
Or in other numbers: I’ve now spent ~70% of my adult life, or ~41% of my entire life, living by a name I chose for myself.
I used a deed poll to change my name. And nowadays – with several iterations of my personal documentation issued over the 18½ years I’ve been using my name – it doesn’t even come up any more, except when somebody observes “hey, that’s an unusual name you’ve got there!” I haven’t even looked at my deed poll in over a decade, for example. My name today is more well-established as the one I was given at birth was by the time I reached adulthood.
And so it occurred to me this weekend, while I was reimplementing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk: because I was born in Scotland, there’s no reason I can’t also get my name changed on the one remaining bit of documentation that still has my birth name: my birth certificate! Scottish law allows me to have this retroactively changed for a modest fee, which would result in a re-issued birth certificate that showed “Dan Q” (with my birth name included as an “also known as”).
I’m flip-flopping on whether I should. Want to see my pros/cons lists?
Pros:
- It’s the one last (changeable) thing that could reflect my actual name
- It feels a little weird nowadays when I bump into my old name (e.g. on my first degree certificate, which I had to dig out earlier this year for a job application)
- It’d be nice to understand the Scottish process, as (via FreeDeedPoll.org.uk) I end up helping lots of people to change their name
Cons:
- I don’t need it; I’ve got all the documentation I could ever need and much, much more in my name; it’ll probably make no material difference to my life
- It seems symbolically like a rejection of the past, or of my family, or of an attempt to rewrite history, all of which feel icky
- It’s not free!
I don’t know which way I’ll eventually fall on this. Considering how… inconsequential it’d be, either way, to my day-to-day life… it’s surprising how much of an itch it is, at the back of my brain!
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