The last unwinding
Changing my name was harder than I thought.
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Last week, on the three-year anniversary of leaving my marriage, I legally reclaimed my maiden name. I figured the anniversary was a good nudge to brave the bureaucracy and get it done. The documents were sitting on my desk. The Social Security office was down the street. Once I picked my new name, all I had to do was sign the forms and hand them in.
But when I walked into the soulless Social Security waiting room, my stomach churned. I clutched the manila envelope with my documents and willed myself to breathe. This is just admin, I told myself, like the dentist or the DMV. It’s a paperwork root canal. But to my body, the paperwork felt like divorce all over again. It remembered the long legal slog in its cells and was primed to panic.
The loudspeaker rasped ticket numbers: 116, 117….118. I hurried to the counter and plunked down my documents: my name-change application, my passport and my official divorce decree, signed by court clerk Nancy T. Sunshine. I wondered if Ms. Sunshine appreciated the irony while the Social Security lady slowly traced each sentence of the decree with her sparkly purple fingernail.
The Defendant was served personally at his residence…
The marriage is hereby dissolved due to irretrievable breakdown of the relationship…
...the Plaintiff is authorized to resume use of the prior surname of McCrocklin.
Sentence by sentence, my stress surged. I had avoided reading the court decree since my divorce was finalized ten months before. I had packed these painful moments away in a wooden chest, wrapped it in chains, and flung it to the bottom of the sea. But as I watched her finger, old memories swarmed from the page like drowned ghosts. I felt the room going shimmery and beginning to tilt.
“Don’t you dare!” I told my body firmly. “We’re almost done.”
“I hate this!” my body cried, a toddler-style meltdown brewing.
“Please just keep it together a few more minutes,” I pleaded, “and I’ll buy you a croissant.”
Vertigo is my body’s favorite protest when my feelings are too much, and the last thing I needed right now was to curl up in a ball on the grimy beige floor. To calm the impending tantrum, I started naming the colors around me. It’s a trick I use to stay grounded when I start to spin. Look, body! Over here! What color is this?
Red: The Covid sign pinned to the plexiglass. Orange: The monotonous cubicles. Pale pink: The office walls, just like the courthouse across the street where my ex and I had married 15 years before. We had hitched our lives carelessly to secure his U.S. Green Card. I wore a short cream dress, a tangerine belt, and shoes with pale pink roses. He wore a tangerine tie.
Blue: The color of my passport with my married name and soon-to-be-null Kenyan Permanent Residency, the equivalent of his Green Card. Mine was not green, just a stamp and a scribble on a passport page, gray like the grinding wheels of bureaucracy you endure to live with your beloved. But when your partner is from another country, someone is always far from home.
The clerk with the purple nails called me back to the present. She told me to sign the forms with my new name and throw my old Social Security card away.
That was that. I was officially Liz McCrocklin again.
“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I said to my body, swaying slightly as I left.
I bought the promised croissant and ate it while my heart rate came down. Then I texted my friends that I had finally done the thing I’d been talking about for ages.
“It’s a big step, I’m glad you did it when you were emotionally ready,” one replied.
“You did it! Sometimes it’s worth waiting to do something hard,” said another.
“I’m so proud of you, way to be patient with yourself,” said a third.
Little did they know that patience had nothing to do with it; that was a straight-up emotional slugfest. I was glad it was done but also deeply frustrated with myself. Vertigo at the Social Security office, really?? Why the hell was changing my name so hard? My divorce had been final for nearly a year, I should be over it by now!
“Um, excuse me,” my body said, calmed by the croissant. “Maybe if you stopped insisting how I should feel, you might understand how that appointment actually felt?”
“That felt like the reckless love and foolish hopes of your wedding day,” my body continued. “It felt like the impossible tension of loving someone from another country. It felt like letting go of the right to live in Kenya and the life you’d built there. It felt like regret and hard-won wisdom. It felt like ending things all over again.”
Hmmm, maybe my body had a point, and it wasn’t just paperwork after all. Changing my name was a new identity and the last unwinding of my marriage. It was freedom and loss all tangled together. Maybe if I let myself feel the fullness of what I’d just done, my body wouldn’t have to throw a tantrum to get my attention.
Slowly, I realized that I’d fallen into my old trap of wanting to feel healed. I’d been thinking of healing as a place that you reach where the box of pain stays shut forever at the bottom of the sea. I craved a neat narrative: my three-year anniversary, a new name, a tidy bow on a tough chapter. But tidy arcs and happy endings were invented by Hollywood. In real life, nothing ever sums itself up the way we like to think.
I realized that should was part of the problem: I should be over my divorce, this shouldn’t be hard. But should is a straightjacket, a futile attempt at control. Reality is far messier—and more elastic. Healing means holding the space for both truths at once: that was hard and I did it. I am proud of my progress and I still have a box of old pain. It just is, and it’s ok.
This week’s inspiration:
Last week, my feelings had feelings. It reminded me of the lovely poem "My Worries Have Worries" by Laura Villareal, read by
on .In the Social Security waiting room, I read this thoughtful piece by
about how our bodies remember grief anniversaries. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.To everyone who checked in and listened and gave hugs and sent hot chocolate chip cookies addressed to Liz Unicorn in the last few weeks, thank you.
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.
we're rooting for you! i totally relate to the anniversaries creeping up on you and your body keeping the score
I don't know how you do it, but I'm amazed at all you are.