Originally posted by RICHARD
K9,
But, does a name change really tweak your essence? Who YOU believe you are???

If you want to be Shirley or Amy for the week, you still go back to being who you were when you started!

You were --------- before you became Shirley or Amy.

It doesn't change the starting point. Your name may change later on, but does a name change who you are physically of mentally?
In theory of course it shouldn't, but would I feel different if suddenly tomorrow I became Gertrude? I think it would have an emotional impact, a sense of losing something that was mine, a part of who I was. Now I didn't really feel that way when I changed my surname to my husband's, but also the reason I was open to the change was because I wanted the identity of being family and having the same last name. Logically it doesn't make a lot of sense that you'd feel or be any different no matter if you changed your name every day, but I guess it is one of those things that is hard to explain the why of. Definitely for me, a first name has more identity tied into it than a last name, a first name is the word for who you are, a last name is who your family is, sometimes also identifying your culture as well, i.e. if it is a Spanish or Chinese last name.

I think it was Val who started a thread in General once asking if people felt their name affected who they became and how happy they were in life. It was an interesting conversation and some people seemed to feel that if they had been named differently they might have turned out differently. I suppose in the end it all comes down to how much of an identity it is to each individual person.

Many animals identify each other by their scent or sound. I suppose with people we have lost a lot of our senses over the eons and use written and spoken language to identify each other. It is interesting to think about and consider, but my brain is going on vacation about this time so I can't get any deeper into the psyche of it than this