Hi, everyone. With everything going on in Texas and Ukraine right now, I haven’t been able to update as regularly. Sorry about that! (We’re also approaching midterms week, which means my life is messy currently.) Because I want to be able to come back to this in more depth later on, I’ll be taking you through a little of my announcement week and my hearing today, but the actual changing of a name does not end when you get the piece of paper granting it. A lot of that process is still ongoing for me, and I’ll probably opt from here to post an update at maybe the six-month and one-year marks to explain how a lot of that shakes out moving forward. (If you’re not aware, an Order Changing Name doesn’t actually make anyone swap anything for you; it just gives you the Certified Piece Of Paper that you then submit to everywhere you’ve ever existed and hope they agree to change it. More on that in the coming months.)

I’ve largely blocked out announcement week in my mind—it was mostly a blur as it happened—but there were a few crucial items of business remaining. First, I had some last-minute troubleshooting on my website to figure out, which I sorted over a period of several days with the help of a handful of trusted friends. I’d already changed my Twitter handle and name, since I tend to preload things on there more in advance, but in the two days before December 1, I had to change my name on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of other places. (I didn’t get to sort Snapchat, which I thankfully only use for about ten people, until this past week!) Going through and finalizing my name change on socials meant I also had to lay low for the rest of November; I stopped posting and stayed out of conversations, even when I desperately wanted to jump into them. Even though it was only a couple days, I was nervous that someone would notice before I’d announced and . . . I don’t know . . . be extra transphobic in my direction, I guess. That didn’t happen, but the pressure was mounting.