Cormier

How I almost became Emily Vale, and what brought me back to my birth name.

I am going back to my birth name. It’s Cormier. For twelve months before I decided that, I considered something entirely new.

Vale. The perfect name, curated and designed especially for me by my AI assistant.

I seriously considered changing my name to Emily Vale. I mean, Vale has no history, no lineage, no inherited weight. It belongs to no one yet. I could have made it mine so cleanly and completely, without looking backward at anything. I was so serious about this decision that I brought the people who matter most to me into it. I had tried it on the way you try on something that isn’t quite ‘you’ but could be, if you decided to become the kind of person who wears it. A name I would have chosen for myself, from nothing, as a pure act of self-invention.

There is something genuinely seductive about that. If you subscribe to the idea that identity is just something we’re building for ourselves anyway, why not build it from scratch? Why not step out of the whole inherited mess of it and just decide, cleanly, who you are going to be?

What is in a name anyway…

There is a document in my files that predates every other version of me. A birth certificate, the first official proof that I existed, that I was attached to this world, to a family, to a name. That name is Cormier. My parents were young and unmarried when I arrived. My mother raised me, and so I was given her name. Her father’s name. A French Canadian Acadian name of a people expelled from their land who scattered and survived and rebuilt, with a tenacity that never announced itself.

I have been three people since that birth certificate.

Emily Hodgson. Hodgson came with a marriage and a family I chose and that chose me back. I even kept it long after the marriage ended because it is my daughter’s name, and I was proud to carry it. I still am. I hold this name not because it belonged to me, but because it connected me to people I love. That is reason enough. I have no complicated feelings about Hodgson. It was real, and it remains real.

Emily Madden was different. Madden was easy, pliable, weightless, elegant. The name came with my second marriage, and with no particular history for me, no inherited complexity, nothing that required anything of me beyond wearing it. I built something real with it: a career, a reputation, a professional identity that people recognized and respected. There was always a moment, signing my name at the bottom of something that mattered, introducing myself in a room where the introduction mattered, where something small and quiet inside me noticed the distance between the name and the person.

Madden was like a great shade of lipstick. Impeccable. Irrelevant.

The other name I didn’t get was Davis.

My father’s name. And quieter still, an Algonquin bloodline. My grandmother and my aunts are Algonquin of the Pikwakanagan First Nation. That ancestry lives in my blood and not in any name I have ever signed. It traveled through generations the way things travel when a country has made it costly to speak them aloud. There was confusion around it for a long time. Silence that was never ours to carry, but that we carried anyway.

I am on a journey with that part of my story. I don’t have all the answers. I am not sure I have even found all the questions yet.

What I know is this: you cannot go looking for your roots while simultaneously cutting the thread. The two movements are not compatible. Vale would have been a clean break. Cormier keeps me traceable to myself, to my history, to the journey I am only beginning to understand.

What Cormier asks of me is something Vale never would have.

It asks me to stand in the complications. To carry the Acadian and the Algonquin and the Irish and the two marriages and the daughter and the career, and to carry all of it visibly, as the person I am right now, building the thing I am building now. It asks me to be traceable. To myself, to my history, to the grandmothers and the grandfathers and the birth certificate in my files and the journey of reconnection I am only beginning to understand.

Changing my name to Emily Vale would have let me off the hook. I have come to realize that I don’t want off the hook. I want the thing that is actually mine.

Showing up as who you actually are is not a vulnerability. It is a competitive advantage. As a species we are drowning in performance, therefore being who you are is also perhaps a form of generosity.

When you are genuinely recognizably yourself, other people feel the permission to be the same.

That’s, maybe, my whole thing.