identity crisis
Sad but true: I am thirty-eight years old and I’ve never had a passport. I have left the country, but just barely, and only back in the old days, when the government would let you mosey a ways north or south without a bar code tattooed on your forehead.
For over a decade now I’ve regularly acknowledged to all and sundry that yes, I should get a passport, so I at least have the option to travel, if not the time and/or money. I have also managed to completely avoid making any actual progress in that direction. Last month I forced my own hand, by purchasing nonrefundable plane tickets to another country. Okay, it’s only Mexico, but it’s a part of Mexico that isn’t walking distance from the U.S. border, which is a big step for me.
The reason for my procrastination: fear of bureaucratic smackdown.
For anyone that doesn’t know, ‘Karawynn Long’ is not in any part the name I was born with. I changed my last name with a court order in 1991, but kept my original first name (Karen) in a foolish attempt to make the transition easier on my father, with whom I still had a relationship at the time. Except it didn’t seem to upset him any less, and the ensuing complications were definitely Not Worth It.
Those included three years (1992-1995) spent wrangling the change of my first and middle names on all government documents without an official piece of paper, which was no small task. Legally, you have every right to change your name simply by using another name, as long as you have no intent to defraud. Practically speaking, it’s a dead stupid struggle. I don’t recommend it unless you are possessed of infinite patience, charm, and stubbornness. I was frequently working with only one of the three.
The drivers’ license was the last to go, in 1995. Coincidentally, the relationship with my father only made it a few months past that.
I’ve always hoped that I would, with logic and a battery of alternate documentation, be able to convince a passport agent to use what is in fact my legal name, even without a certified piece of paper to precisely that effect. This hope was dashed on Monday as I realized that passport applications are only accepted by implacable intermediaries who have no authority to bend the rules, and there was no way I could speak to a person with actual decision-making power in the matter. I would have more luck sweet-talking a drink out of a soda machine.
Which is how on Tuesday morning I came to be sitting in a county courtroom waiting for a judge to affirm that I am indeed me.
It was technically simple, and emotionally difficult. The intermediate stages really did feel like my identity was being invalidated, or something equally dramatic. Signing a document as ‘Karen Long’ felt like bad forgery. The only time I ever use cursive is in my signature; I print everything else. After sixteen years the K-a-r-a is as automatic as breathing, and I literally could not make my hand sign K-a-r-e instead. I had every conscious intention, but my hand wrote ‘a’ instead and then stuttered and flailed.
I’d just like to take a moment to send some extra-swell karma to the court clerk who asked the judge to invert protocol and handle my thirty-second civil procedure first, instead of making me sit through umpteen hours of criminal trials. It really was just that fast: do you solemnly swear, I do, by the power vested in me, amen. Or something like that. Back out to the window to fork over $110 and voila: I am me.
Sometime in the next month or so I should receive a passport for Karawynn Long, sporting the single worst photo I’ve ever had on a government ID, along with my stack of birth certificate / name change / name change papers. I’ve already decided that I will then pay the state of Texas to change the name of my birth certificate on file. Neat little way of rewriting history, that ... and then even if I lose my paper trail, I won't ever have to go through this again.
I am nearly exultant in anticipation.
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karawynn) wrote,
accomplished
