Hello so basically I don’t like my last name and I’ve been bullied for it for years. Whenever someone figures out what my last name is they don’t say anything to be polite but I see it in their facial expression which makes me upset to say the least. My last name is “Cumming” and I know that there is a famous celebrity named Alan Cumming but his first and last name sound well together and mine doesn’t. I just want to start fresh in college and stop feeling constantly anxious whenever someone is going to call my name. I don’t like the fact how our society borderline defines us by our name and I just want it to stop. However, I don’t want my previous bullies to think that they got to me which is a downside but at this point I don’t care. I just wish I was born with a normal name without sexual connotations. In fact when I was in 5th grade I basically exposed my grade to knowing about porn…This started after people were looking up their names so I did it too and when I saw what popped up it became a scandalous trend to look up my name. I may be over exaggerating but I honestly feel like changing my name will not only alleviate my current situation of being made fun, but also prevent how other people look differently toward me. This could be useful in college as well as in my professional life in the future.
Do you guys think I should do it? Thanks!
Sure, do it. You’ve thought it out and want to do it. If you are 18, you won’t need your parents’ consent.
To do a name change you usually have to file a petition, pay for a notice to be posted (usually in a ‘legal’ newspaper) and have a background check run. The court procedures are usually pretty easy. I used to hear them in our county court. The reasons most people had for changing were after a marriage or divorce (failed to do it during the proceeding or a parent trying to change a kid’s name), a misspelling that had been going on for years and the person now needed a passport, person had used a different name for years (usually a nickname) and now wanted that as a legal name.
Whenever you do it, now or later, you’ll get an order and then you use that order to change the first thing, like a license or SSN, and then things just snowball from there. If you do it before you graduate from hs, your diploma will be in your new name. I think you can apply to have your passport changes for free if you do it within a certain time of the name change (usually after a marriage, but I think a legal name change would work too).
A high school friend of mine changed her name when she was about 20. She had a hard to spell, hard to pronounce Polish name. She’d grown up in foster care so had no ties to the name.
I would do it too, OP.
Follow the process so clearly outlined in the first post.
I had friends who, when they married, chose a completely new last name because they did not like either of theirs. There only constraint: one of them had a bunch of nice monogrammed towels, so they chose a new last name starting with the same letter so they could keep the nice towels. ?
My only additional thoughts to what’s already been said is that there is a lot of red tape to doing a name change and it does take some time. A friend’s D just went through it and had an issue with her passport not matching the new name for a study abroad program and had to pay a lot to expedite the new passport.
FWIW, Cumming seems like a fairly common name to me, and I would think as you got older, you’d see much less reaction but if it bothers you this much, go for it.
If you feel better and motivated, go for it.
Sure, go for it. I was expecting a worse name than that. My mom went to school with a family named Crap and hopefully they changed their names by now.