I used to be Ben Clark

My name is Ben Sage. It hasn’t always been. For the first two decades and change of my life, I was Ben Clark, and one June day the Civil Court of the City of New York entered an order making me legally someone with a different name.

Same person. Same fingerprints. Different name on everything from that day forward, and the old name on everything from before, forever.

And here’s the part even people who knew me back then mostly don’t know: Ben Clark wasn’t the whole story either. My college application, still sitting on my hard drive, lists my full legal name as Richard Benjamin Clark.¹ I was born Richard, called Ben from the middle name, and later chose Sage. The name everyone knew me by was already one step removed from the paperwork before any judge got involved.

The rest of the evidence is easy to find, because I keep linking to it. The asteroid paper from when I was seventeen, the one where I told NASA an asteroid would hit Earth, is bylined Ben Clark. The high school films are credited to Ben Clark.² Even my commits at the startup where I rented out parked cars are authored by Ben Clark. The kid in those stories, the one cold-emailing astronauts and pointing telescopes, that was Ben Clark doing all of it. I didn’t inherit his résumé. I was there.

Why

There’s a real reason, and it’s a good one. It’s also a longer story than I’m ready to publish, and I’d rather leave this section short than fill it with something tidy that isn’t true. So for now, the honest version is: it was deliberate, it was considered for a long time before it was done, and I have never once regretted it. The rest is coming when I can do it justice.

The mechanics nobody thinks about

Here’s the part that surprised me, and the part nobody warns you about. You don’t change your name once. You change it hundreds of times, over years, and some of them never take.

The court order is the easy part, and I can walk you through it because I kept the paper. A verified petition. An order granting leave, signed by the Honorable Carol Sharpe and stamped ENTERED the same day. Then the part nobody believes: New York requires you to publish notice of your name change in an actual newspaper, and the order names the paper — mine ran in the Irish Echo.³ File proof of publication, get the certified copy stamped, and the state considers you renamed. That paper is the root credential, and then the real work starts: Social Security, passport, driver’s license, banks, insurance, the diploma, every account I had ever created with an email address. Each one has its own form, its own definition of proof, and its own opinion about how long it should take. For a while you live in a superposition: new name on the license, old name on the credit card, and a small explanation ready at every counter.

And then there’s the layer that never updates: the internet. Published papers keep their bylines. Film credits are burned into the film. Git histories are immutable on purpose.⁴ The past is written in ink, and it’s signed Ben Clark. I used to think of that as a bug. I’ve come around to thinking it’s the honest part: the record shows exactly when one name ends and the other begins, like a geologic boundary in my own paperwork.

Page two of index NC-000656-20/NY: “…shall be known by the name (First) BENJAMIN (Middle) LEONARDO (Last) SAGE, which s/he is hereby authorized to assume.” Entered June 24th, 2020, certified July 6th. The root credential.

What it’s like to have a former name

Mostly, it’s quiet. Months go by where it never comes up. Then someone from before says “Clark” and an entire era loads into memory, or a background check takes an extra day, or I search the old name and meet my own archive like it belongs to a younger brother I know unusually well.

A changed name splits a life into a before and an after, cleanly, in a way almost nothing else does. Ben Clark got into Stanford. Ben Sage built the career. I claim both.