This is a major concern for everyone in today's information age. However, in our digital age, the problems related to changing one's identity can be nearly as painful as when one's identity is assumed by another. Many women refuse to change their names when they get married for personal reasons or professional ones.



I changed my name when I married for my own reasons. However, it seems as if the government has made the decision for us by making the process as difficult as possible. First came changing my driver's license. They said I couldn't change the name unless my social security card listed the new name. So it was on to the Social Security Administration.

First, they required an original copy of the marriage license. On the second trip, I got the paperwork correct. The card arrived with my middle name misspelled. The third trip to the office resulted in a correct card arriving two weeks later. Back at the Department of Public Safety, they accepted the new social security office. A week later, I received notice that I had to come back. They'd ruined the photo and required a new one to be taken.

My HMO simultaneously mixed my medical records with those of a woman with a similar name who was also a student at the same college. I was surprised to get cholesterol test results in the mail; I'd gone in for a cold the week before. It took too many phone calls and several in person visits to straighten things out. The personal visit to the records office solved the problem I was 4 inches too tall and a hundred pounds too light to be the person whose records they were trying to include in my files.

It wasn't until a few years later that I found an error they hadn't corrected. Fortunately, they had mistakenly put a blood type of O in my records; my true blood type was A. Thank God it wasn't the opposite mistake. Then I had to argue with my employer to straighten out their medical records from the HMO's mistake.

They'd received bills for the wrong person, and my bills had not necessarily been paid. Getting an updated work ID card was the simplest task that month. The post office was the worst. We changed my name on the mail box, asking them to deliver any mail in both names. Well, the clerk removed my name from that mail box and didn't replace it with any other version of my name. They stopped delivering mail in either name.

If the apartment had not been all bills paid, the financial disaster could have been worse than the medical billing problems. The hassles I went through discouraged a few of my friends into NOT changing their names upon marriage.

When we seek to simplify our lives for the sake of improving it, we may find we have to stay who were are in both the legal and spiritual sense.