Just over 8 years ago I changed my name to Dávila. By the time I notified the DMV, made the trip to city hall to get a new social security card, and figured out how to put the accent mark over that first “á,” I more or less became accustomed to my new name.
The funny thing is, my name change came at a unique time in the evolution of technology and the integration of it into my life. As April Collier I never had a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile. April Collier had a yahoo email address with the password “iguessihaveto” because her boyfriend at the time insisted that she should have one and literally sat her down at his computer with a beer and walked her through the steps of registering. It rarely got used. That person named April Collier certainly never blogged about anything.
So I got to thinking yesterday, is there any online record of April Collier at all? I have a google alert set up for “April Dávila” so that I can be aware when people talk about me in the present tense (that may sound paranoid, but it actually happened quite a bit when I was doing the Monsanto project), but before this morning I never once googled “April Collier.”
Turns out there are quite a few April Collier’s out there, but only one link to the younger version of myself: check it out.
Just a baby April, that is. So young. So smiley. That little blurb was written in the fall of 1997. Fifteen years ago. Dang.
I sometimes wonder if any old friends have searched for my name and found nothing. How strange it is that when we take our husbands name (and I know not everyone does, but I wanted to) we kind of leave that old version of ourselves behind. I suppose we all leave our younger selves behind as grow older, but changing a name really delineates between “then” and “now.”
Well, hopefully, the next time an old friend tries to find me as April Collier, I will have used it enough times in this post that it will show up on a google search, and they’ll know I’m April Dávila now.
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