Announcing a new byline: Henry Matthew Alt.

ast year, when I reached my tenth anniver­sary with this blog, I changed my byline to Hen­ry Scott Alt; that was to reflect my thought that I would also change my name legal­ly. Then The Bad Thing hap­pened, which I will not oth­er­wise talk about, ever. It is enough to say that, because of The Bad Thing, I stopped blog­ging and delet­ed all my social media accounts, sim­ply so that I could address it as I need­ed to. When I returned ear­li­er this year, I did so under my orig­i­nal name.

But now The Bad Thing is over, and the overness of it—the per­ma­nent, world-with­out-end overness of it—frees me to pur­sue ear­li­er pur­pos­es.

I had thought, last year, that Scott should be the mid­dle name—both to retain some­thing of the orig­i­nal as well as to assure the peo­ple who call me Scott by force of long habit that they’re not entire­ly inac­cu­rate. But an extra year of reflec­tion left me unsat­is­fied, because I want­ed to find a name clos­er to my under­stand­ing of who I am.

But Alt, what’s wrong with Scott Eric? I’ve been asked.

Noth­ing’s real­ly “wrong” with it, I’ve nev­er hat­ed it as some peo­ple hate their names, but a good Face­book friend put her fin­ger on what is cen­tral to the change: Chang­ing your name, she says, “is an aspi­ra­tional act that announces that a soul’s self-deter­mi­na­tion has come to the fore­front, replac­ing the name that was giv­en by oth­ers.”

That’s as spe­cif­ic as I am going to be, and prob­a­bly as spe­cif­ic as I can. Self-determination—and most impor­tant­ly for me self-def­i­n­i­tion—has “come to the fore­front.” I say who I am, no one else, and that starts with say­ing what name I am called. It’s an alto­geth­er per­son­al thing, born of expe­ri­ence spe­cif­ic to myself.

So I won’t say why change it, but I will say why “Hen­ry” and why “Matthew.”

• Hen­ry.

This was my grand­fa­ther’s name—Henry Vic­tor Alt. He died when I was two (he was a year younger than I am now), and I can tell you what it is to miss some­one you can’t remem­ber. My first expe­ri­ence of loss was in learn­ing that he had died and that I could not remem­ber him, though I could look at pic­tures of the two of us. In tak­ing his name, I feel in a way that I am reclaim­ing him (as well as the nam­ing tra­di­tion that made him the last of four con­sec­u­tive Hen­rys).

I’ve long thought about chang­ing my name to Hen­ry. But for years it was a pass­ing thought. Then one day the thought came again, and it did not go away; it kept harass­ing me. So I prayed about it for a year, and then I prayed more, and still it did not go away. So I knew that this was God talk­ing to me, God chang­ing my name as much as he renamed Abram Abra­ham and Simon Peter.

And I very much like the name.

• Matthew.

I am grate­ful to an IRL friend for lead­ing me to this one. “You’ve got to watch The Cho­sen,” she said as I ago­nized over a mid­dle name. “Maybe one of the char­ac­ters will stand out to you.”

And one of the char­ac­ters did. St. Matthew has autism, and I have a great deal of respect for the cre­ators of the show for decid­ing that they want­ed one of the dis­ci­ples to have autism; and I have a great deal of respect for the actor, Paras Patel, for being able to pull it off. So many fic­tion­al char­ac­ters with autism are stereo­types. But Matthew in The Cho­sen is not; Matthew is him­self.

Because of that, and because I iden­ti­fy with so much else about that char­ac­ter, I chose Matthew for a mid­dle name. (Also, the actu­al St. Matthew begins his gospel with a geneal­o­gy, and geneal­o­gy has long been an impor­tant hob­by of mine.)

Self-def­i­n­i­tion, and even self-nam­ing in some cas­es (mine), is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant for peo­ple on the spec­trum.

I’m too old now to think I can give a detailed list of the ways my blog will change because of rebrand­ing the byline (or my life because of a legal name change). I’ll be curi­ous to see that myself. If I’ve learned any­thing through my expe­ri­ence, it’s how dumb it is to try to pre­dict the future.