A surname arrives with a file attached. Reputations, expectations, old grievances, a sense of what people like you do, all of it precedes you into rooms you have never been in. Some of that is a gift and some of it is a weight, and you had no part in writing either. Understanding what the name carries is the first step to deciding your relationship to it.

Ask what people assume when they hear your family name and whether those assumptions serve you. Where they do not, your own record is what slowly rewrites them. That work is gradual and it does work.