What's in a Name

and why I'm changing mine

Names are funny things, often bestowed upon us before we exist in the world, by people who don’t yet know who we’re going to be. Both something to grown into and to grow out of.

They can be both fluid and static, can signify so much and nothing at all.

I’ve never been overly attached to my name, it always seemed a bit boring and I was asked to many times if I was ‘that’ Louise Brown of IVF fame (I’m not). I’m also the second twin, so have been aware of how easily I could have received a different name, if I’d been a bit quicker off the mark.

My name really is an accident of birth.

Over the years it’s been morphed into different sounds, some I liked (lou-lou-belle and BooBoo are my favourites, although very context specific), others I still can’t stand (Lou still makes me shudder, but is what many people know me as). It took me a long time to feel able to say that I really preferred be called Louise, because it seemed the easier to let others name me than to name myself.

Growing up in a heteronormative environment, I thought there would be the opportunity to change at least my surname when I got married (and held the hope that the other option would be more interesting). But when my wife and I were finally allowed a legal recognition of our marriage the law was still new and no one was quite sure of the mechanisms. We toyed with changing by deed poll, but neither of us could settle on something that felt right enough to both of us to go through the hassle.

The idea of changing it for a reason other than marriage didn’t seem realistic, although I knew other people did. The old reasoning of ‘that’s not for people like you’ was still strong, fuelled by the worry of what people would think, and how they would react. So I quietly got on with life as Louise Brown, and didn’t often give it much thought.

Until recently.

I often talk about anchor points with my clients. The things we know to be true and the people, places, objects, thoughts and actions that ground us in our truth about ourselves. While lots of my life has been in flux over the last couple of months, I’ve been doing my best to practice what I preach and have been grounding myself in my own truth (and playing a lot of Final Fantasy 7).

One of my realisations in this is that my name is not an anchor point to me, I still don’t feel much attachment to it, and sometimes it can feel jarring when I see it written down. Like it belongs to a different version of me, one I outgrew a long time ago or maybe one I never was.

The final push was signing a contract with a publisher and realising that this was not the name I wanted to go on the cover of my book. If I was going to change it now was the time to do it.

So I thought about my own anchor points, the ones I wanted to keep hold of and to connect with every time I wrote my name, and suddenly the answer was obvious (and in fact was the name I’d originally considered using in my twenties). I’ve even added a bonus middle name, because if I’m making a change I might as well do it all!

I’m keeping Louise, I’m attached to some of the nicknames it generated and I like it when its said in full, but I’m adding in Joan as a middle name and replacing Brown with Lucas as a surname, so now my anchor points will always be with me.

So now I start the boring administrative job, of updating my name everywhere (or I will once I get the official paperwork done), I’m not looking forward to it, but the time and the name is right and that makes it worth it.

I am finally naming myself, not a name to grow into or grow out of, but a name that feels right for all the parts of me.

Hello, I’m Louise Joan Helen Lucas, it’s nice to meet you.

Do feel free to introduce yourself as you’d like to be known in the comments.

I’m taking some time off over the summer, but I hope to be back in September, with more regular posts (although no promises).