Art by Lauren Luchs

Content Warnings: metaphors involving violence and death imagery

Changing one’s name and revisiting old writing with a critical editor’s eye: is reinvention a violence done toward one’s past self, or a spoke in the wheel of constant recreation?

Do you think that a name change is a violent act? I don’t, personally; but sometimes people disagree. I don’t see it as something that one must feel guilty over, something that one must roll up in a rug or kick under the couch. There’s no homicide involved, not in my experience. I would never kill a little girl, even if people look at me like I have; but the concept of a ‘dead’name is implication enough. It seems to beg for confession, for incarceration. You did what to your name? the term asks with a flashlight to my face. I avert my eyes in response, and use my toe to kick the body further from view.

In reality (in the present), I know that a name change is not violent, or bloody or any other harsh term that may describe how it looks on paper. I know this now, but it was a hard revelation to come to; self-editing is an ugly, messy process. It slices you up in two, leaves you disjointed, leaves you feeling like two people rather than one. Half dead little girl and half homicidal adult. And I think that’s a mischaracterisation; but my obsession with self-editing could be used as proof in a court case for the little girl’s murder.

Sometimes I find myself rereading the messy prose I wrote when I was thirteen; to open a new document right after to rewrite the horror I just read. I wouldn’t call this process violent—though when the old work’s grammar is ignorant and its language is impossibly simple, I do feel something very intense and very primal rise within me. I curse and sigh at the words on the page, typed in Comic Sans and spelt through a first-person drawl, then create a new document with the justify alignment, whose font is something a little cleaner (Times? Georgia?). I make the first slice through the chest of the little girl.

I was fifteen when I decided upon my new name, nineteen when I chose to tell the government about it. I want to change it legally, I said to them, but I don’t want to be violent about it. I just want it to be simple and easy (and cheap would be nice, too). Unfortunately, the government did not oblige any of these demands. When I asked it for a new legal name, it nodded its head­—with a condition. It, a force without a name, asked for my birth certificate back, and suddenly it did feel violent, it did feel like I had killed a little girl. The old certificate, twenty years old now, was folded in all the wrong places and held a dozen unidentifiable stains on the back. It had my mother’s maiden name in the postal information printed on the other side. It had the first address my parents ever owned together. It had the old name, the dead little girl’s name.

I see her in my editing process, in the document untouched for six years which today is altered. Her work lies on a table before me and I stare at it with a critical eye, not a friendly one. I ponder which mark I will make in it first, which of its insecurities I will foremost fix during this twenty-hour surgery. The lore-dumping? Or the running sentences? The dead little girl watches me slice up her work; I assure her that this won’t hurt a bit.

It was almost a month before I plucked up the courage to send my old birth certificate to the government. I sent it via registered post after long ruminations and conversations with my mum surrounding the ethics of killing a little girl. I mailed her interstate to Services NSW. But it’s like she’s disappearing, was the crux of most of our talks when I told her what the application was asking from me. I’ve had this document for twenty years. She asked me why we couldn’t just have both: both the little girl that used to exist, and the adult that now exists. And I could have explained to her the government’s fears of identity fraud, or I could have read her verbatim the statement on the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages website, or even simply stated that there was no way around this rule. But all I said was I really want to do this. I remember feeling like I had done something violent then. But this process was never meant to be.

Whenever I make a clean cut through the belly of an old and dusty draft, I find an immaculate number of cancers and cavities, and turn my nose away in judgement. I pick at them, interchanging them with healthier substitutes, rejecting them altogether, deciding that no liver at all is better than one which is spotted and yellowing. I turn my scalpel inward, poking and prodding between the intricacies of its innards, tossing pieces I decide it does not need into the biohazard basket beside me. My document looks like Frankenstein’s monster in Times New Roman. 

It seems violent. It seems like replacement, like maceration. Something vital is always lost in a rewrite, they say, just like translation. It is impossible to replicate in English the half-dozen versions of the pronoun ‘I’ that are found in Japanese. But Haruki Murakami writes that “I have always felt that translation is fundamentally an act of kindness”. Why? Rewriting is gruesome, it’s separation, it’s replacement. It has always felt that way; but does it have to? When Murakami translates, he does so carefully, thoughtfully. He understands that rewriting kills some aspects of the original, but uplifts other parts. It becomes his own expression of love to the literature. When I rewrite, I spend days on one document, hours on one sentence. I spent time and care on a dusty document  that would not think twice if I left and never came back. I cut it open because I love the work enough to care how it presents itself. Because, honestly, what is self-editing if not self-love?

When I found my new birth certificate in the mail, ripped it open, held its fresh green paper, I stared at the new name for ten minutes, thinking of the little girl who, no, had not been killed but instead had been changed by kind and careful hands. Violence is the antonym of self-editing, in reality; you have to care an awful lot about something to spend gruelling hours slaving over it. You have to really care about someone to choose a name for them.