What does it mean to change your name after you marry?

[Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”

George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara”

The Social Security Administration office in downtown Santa Ana is tucked inside a tall, smoky glass edifice that defies you to find its front door. Park in the lower depths and wend your way up to a covert side entrance. There, a blasé security guard waves SSA supplicants to a direct elevator to the fifth floor.

Inside the SSA, it’s a Kafkaesque, scaled-down DMV. There are rows of utilitarian chairs, all bolted down. Service windows run the length of the back wall. No art, no color. This was it: I had made it to the final chec