---
title: "Where Identity Begins: Becoming Eileen Alayce"
description: "Eileen Alayce explains choosing a new last name and refusing to make her work identity permanent. Her transition from an inherited name to a chosen one feels familiar."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "link"
published_at: "2026-05-15"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/15/where-identity-begins"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/15/where-identity-begins.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/15/where-identity-begins"
external_url: "https://eileencodes.com/posts/where-identity-begins/"
---

# [Where Identity Begins\: Becoming Eileen Alayce](<https://eileencodes.com/posts/where-identity-begins/>)

> I didn’t want to tie my identity to my work.

That line comes from someone who built a career around `eileencodes`, then deliberately rejected
“Codes” as a legal surname. It landed with me because I went through a smaller but related
transition, from Paul to Pau. One dropped letter looks trivial from the outside. It isn’t. A name is
both a public interface and a private claim: repeated by everyone else, but lived by you.

Tech treats identity as an immutable primary key—a handle, a GitHub history, a title ladder—but
people are not rows. A chosen name does not have to erase the person who carried the old one. Pau
didn’t erase Paul. It made the name fit the person using it.