So I haven’t been secret about it, but I also haven’t been discussing it a ton since I was waiting for it all to get sorted out. I’ve been working on getting my name changed since around September of last year, and I’ve finally begun getting updated official IDs and updating all of my internet things this past week. From now on my name is officially david Wolfpaw.

It wouldn’t be worth writing about if I just took my husband’s name when we married, but we decided not to do that. However I couldn’t shake the thought, and was considering what other things that I could do. I’ve been changing so many things around and becoming more of an adult, and realized that I could just do whatever I wanted.

My previous last name, only seven letters long, was complex in it’s simplicity. It was hard for people to pronounce even after having it pronounced for them, and it was even harder for some people to spell, again after having it spelled out for them. As an example, the paperwork got delayed for a few months because the clerk of court who filed my document, that I printed out with the correct spelling, filed it under an incorrect name and it got lost and had to be amended. Three months gone to that!

Not to mention the fact that I was not the only one with my name, and not even the only one with the same first, middle, and last name that lives in the state of Florida. I decided that if I were going to change, I would take cues from my husband’s name, but choose something that I did not see anyone currently using as a last name.

To that end, I spent plenty of time thinking, and I admit that I’ll never feel fully comfortable with my decision, having changed a core identifier (so that I’m not just one of the many WordPress davids) after establishing myself, and crossing that 30-year-more-adult-threshhold.

The joke I’m going with for now is that while my husband got one finger, I get to have the whole paw. The other joke is on me, when I found out that furries ruin everything™, because it turns out that the name wolfpaw is being used as a screen name already on about 2/3 of the services that I have tried swapping accounts on. The person who has @wolfpaw on Twitter has at least four separate accounts that I easily found, and they’re all sitting inactive for years.

Speaking of changing services, some websites make it far harder than it should be to change names or usernames. I get that I need to show documentation to the bank or my credit card company, but the annoying websites that I mentioned last week treat their ownership of my outdated data too seriously.

After months of waiting, the past week has actually progressed rather rapidly. I went to court last week, confirmed that I wasn’t trying to hide from the law by going to the lair of the law itself (although I guess I should stopped being surprised when I hear people getting caught that way), and the judge passed the order. After that I waited a bit to get some documents, then used those to start getting all of the other ones.

So that’s my weirdish story on changing my name to something made up yet still based on real words that will probably be an entirely different source of confusion for a few years at least. If only I was Henry Lizardlover who made it super clear with his last name what his deal was ????

Republish