There's something strange about changing your name.
On paper, it's just a collection of letters. A username. A domain. An email address. A name at the top of a social media profile. But when you actually start contemplating changing it, you realise your name is carrying a whole lot more than that.
Our names hold identity. They hold versions of ourselves. Relationships. Chapters. Accomplishments. Businesses. Reputations. Memories. And sometimes, during a period of reinvention, you realise the name you've been carrying belongs more to the person you were than the person you're becoming.
Your name is almost like a spell
There's something powerful about someone speaking your name. It immediately represents you. Your name enters the room before you do sometimes. It appears on an email. Someone introduces you on a podcast. A friend mentions you in conversation. Those few syllables contain an entire identity.
Which is probably why changing them can feel surprisingly significant — especially when you've built a business around your personal brand. Suddenly changing your name isn't one decision. It's a hundred tiny ones. Your website. Your social media. Your email address. Your profiles. Your products. Your introductions. All the places across the internet where an old version of you quietly planted her flag.
And every time you encounter one, there's another tiny moment of: does this still belong to me?
Reinvention creates an identity lag
There's a strange phase of reinvention I don't think we talk about enough. It's the period where your future self already knows where you're going, but your present self hasn't completely caught up. I think of it as an identity lag.
You know something is ending. You know something else is beginning. But emotionally, practically and energetically, you're still somewhere in the corridor between the two. That doesn't necessarily mean you're resisting your reinvention. Sometimes you're simply integrating it.
We expect transformation to arrive with a dramatic declaration: this is who I am now! New identity activated, old identity incinerated, please enjoy your complimentary phoenix feathers. But most real reinvention doesn't happen like that.
It happens incrementally. You change one thing. You live with it. You notice how it feels. You change another. You hear someone refer to you differently and notice what happens in your body. You slowly allow the new identity to become familiar — until one day the thing that once felt strange simply feels like you.
You're allowed to try on your next identity
This might be one of the biggest things I'm learning through my own reinvention: you don't have to know exactly who you're going to be before you begin becoming her.
You can experiment. You can try on a name. A business identity. A title. A way of describing what you do. A new creative direction. You can let yourself live inside it for a while and see whether it fits. And if it doesn't, you can change it again.
We attach so much permanence to decisions that are not actually permanent, particularly in business. We agonise over the perfect business name, handle, niche or title because we imagine Future Us chained to whatever Current Us chooses. She isn't. Future You is perfectly capable of changing the damn Instagram handle again.
Sometimes releasing the label helps release the identity
Removing an old title. Changing a business name. Deleting an outdated bio. Retiring an offer. Changing how you introduce yourself. From the outside these look like tiny administrative actions. Internally they can represent something much bigger: I don't need to keep being this person anymore.
Perhaps that's why these seemingly small changes create so much resistance. You're not changing a few words. You're acknowledging that a chapter of your identity has finished. There can be grief in that. There can also be enormous freedom.
Reinvention doesn't require rejection
We don't need to hate our former identities in order to leave them behind. That version of you might have built extraordinary things. She might have survived difficult things. She might have created relationships, businesses, communities or opportunities that changed your life. You can honour her without remaining her.
Reinvention isn't: that person was wrong and I need to erase her. It can simply be: that person brought me here, and now I'm going somewhere else.
Maybe there's a name, title, label or version of yourself you've been holding onto because it has represented you for so long you're not quite sure who you are without it. You don't have to rip it away today. Maybe you just start noticing. Where does it still feel like you? Where does it feel slightly incongruent? What are you ready to experiment with? And who might you become if you stopped assuming you had to remain recognisable to the person you used to be?
Want the story behind this one?
This post was inspired by an episode of The Reinvention Diaries, my private behind-the-scenes podcast inside Starting Over Society. In the full episode I share the personal story that prompted this reflection, what I'm currently changing behind the scenes, the resistance that surprised me, and what it's teaching me about identity as I navigate my own reinvention in real time.