Changing my last name

Neither my married name nor my maiden name feels like me.

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Name-change spiral. February 2022.

I’m stuck between two last names. My married name, Liz V., feels like failure. My maiden name, Liz M., feels like childhood. I’m frozen in a no-man’s land between the two.

I took my husband’s last name on impulse. Shortly after our wedding, I marched to the courthouse without telling him and hitched myself to his family. I desperately wanted to feel more married, more confident in my partnership and more comfortable in my own skin. Branding myself as a wife was a prayer dressed in the trappings of permanence.

Maybe with a new name, I could claim a new version of myself and feel less like the awkward child I’d once been. Childhood Liz always had her nose in a book, shy and serious. Liz M. wore puff-painted t-shirts and did extra-credit assignments and played alone in the weeds at the edge of the playground. For long years, she struggled to fit in.

Married Liz would be confident and popular. Liz V. had a personal stylist and a packed social calendar. She had a beautiful home with walls of books and threw sprawling dinner parties. But like most rebrands, this was a willful slight-of-hand. Married Liz was rarely alone—and constantly lonely. She hovered at the edge of the crowds, still the loner at the lunch table.

So when it came time to pick a new last name after my divorce, neither Liz M. or Liz V. felt like me. I wanted a name that felt like the person I was becoming and not the child or wife that I used to be.

I toyed with taking a third name: perhaps I could lose the spouse and keep the V. My aunt pulled “V” names from our family tree. My friends brainstormed alternatives: Liz von Trapp. Liz VaVoom. Liz Vixen. I renamed my electronics Liz Vixen, which made me laugh, but I needed something less striptease for everyday use.

On paper, this choice should be easy. Somewhere in the blur of the last divorce court appearance, I chose to return to my maiden name and the judge made it so. I’ve already adopted Liz M. at work and relegated Liz V. to junk mail. I just need to jump through some admin hoops and purge my married name from my passport and bank accounts.

All 38 pages of name-change forms are filled in, printed out and sitting on my desk, scowling at me. I just can’t bring myself to send them in.

Road trip upstate. January 2022.

A few weeks ago, during this name-change spiral, I took a road trip with a friend to visit her parents at her childhood home upstate. It was a time capsule: school portraits on the shelves, teenage scribbles on the bedroom walls. Her parents were warm and delighted to embarrass their adult daughter with well-worn tales of her childhood misadventures.

“I’m going to make so much sense when you see me at home,” my friend says, and she does. She has her father’s laugh and her mother’s drive, the same easy smile she had at five with her home-cut bangs and red sailor suit. We laugh at old photos and discuss the joys and heartbreaks of childhood: the taunts in middle school, the comfort in books, the birthday party where nobody came.

I fit every story into the picture of the adult I know, the competent professional I met at work on the other side of the world. They make my friend more complete somehow, more colorful, her outlines filled in. I see the seeds of her warmth, her worries, her activism. She has grown far beyond these old stories and this small house—and yet she is still the child in the red sailor suit.

I sleep in my friend’s childhood bed and think of my own pile of books, my own taunts in middle school, my own birthday parties where nobody came. I think of a photo of myself at age seven, standing with my hands on my hips, sassing the camera. Even then I was bright and bossy and creative. I had a Hypercolor t-shirt and an army of stuffed animals and a mind of my own.

Yes, I also had painfully awkward years where I felt like an outsider. But maybe we were all miserable in middle school? Maybe Liz-as-loner was just an old story I told myself? When I married, I had tried to rebrand the awkward years away, to become someone different at the swipe of a pen. But a new name couldn’t erase my old insecurities any more than getting married could.

It slowly dawns on me that those years I’ve been pushing away have made me who I am. Loneliness fed my curiosity about connection and my hunger to get to the heart of things. It is the root of my empathy, my curiosity, my need to know what makes people tick. Books made me a reader and a lover of words and then, one day, a writer.

Today, writing is as essential as air. Essay by essay, I’m unwinding the old stories. I don’t need parties to make friends. I don’t need to be perfect to be loved. Without these old stories, I could not find the words that I do.

Maybe I could be Liz M. again. After all, I already am.

Liz M, age 7.

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One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.