A Pseudonym Helped Me Cultivate a Healthier Relationship With Social Media
A place on the internet where no one knows your name
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The winter of 2019 was a memory worth shredding. I took on an abusive client who believed her teenage assistant knew more about marketing than I do because of her pedigree, English accent, and collection of four-figure handbags. My bank account and refrigerator became anemic. A friend I once loved and trusted bad-mouthed me to everyone in a five-mile radius. All because she never understood that depression can’t be cured by a pill or by thinking happy thoughts. All because I wasn’t “fixed” or returned to manufacturer settings, because I didn’t resume playing the role of the friend who solved everyone else’s problems. She and her coterie pretended to be mental health allies online while calling me a lunatic between the tweets.
I was on the verge of a breakdown. Pretending to be okay even though I wasn’t because social media demands your Oscar-winning performance, the highlight reel of a life lived in a VSCO filter. Suddenly, the burden of that mask became unbearable. I had a breakdown.
“Friends” proceeded to report my tweets and blocked and unfollowed me. “Friends” feigned their heartfelt concern on social media with their sympathy symphonies of “I hope you get the help you need” but treated me offline like I had the bubonic plague. It felt as if I had ceased to exist to the people who knew me. I deleted all my social media accounts, because even with thousands of followers, I had never felt more alone.
Instead of mindlessly scrolling and falling into the comparison trap, I read 235 books, wrote dozens of personal essays, and the equivalent of a book on how to build a brand. I went to therapy. I took daily walks with a friend and without my phone. I took work when and where I could get it. I told myself the mark of a survivor is not the breakdown but how they crawl their way out of the dark.
Social media has become a place where I pop in for a drink but never linger for a meal.
We face a universal problem: how to manage your personal and professional identities. How much is too much when it comes to what you share? How much do you rely on social media to manage your life or to fill a void? It all comes down to boundaries. Boundaries are about building imaginary fences around real things.
It took me a year away from social media to change the way I established boundaries around its use. Now I consider it a complementary tool in my toolkit instead of a conduit for connection. People don’t know the whole of me, because I choose to share shards of my parts — real relationships are built and nurtured beyond the confines of a screen. Social media has become a place where I pop in for a drink but never linger for a meal.
In the midst of a frightening pandemic, I’ve held steadfast to abstaining from social media, instead pursuing one-to-one social interaction using Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime with the people who matter most. Seeing their faces, hearing their voices, listening to the fears they’re too vulnerable to share online, and having the ability to give them virtual hugs means more than scrolling through a frenetic, nonstop feed of fear and self-editing.
There’s a difference between slowly consuming facts and news and getting caught up in the real-time, panicked chatter. Consuming news at a slower pace and having conversations that extend beyond a status update or tweet have kept me informed, calm, focused, and compassionate for my friends and the world around me.
A few months ago, I considered a return to social media by starting a new Instagram account to share photographs from my yearlong adventure moving all over California and living in Airbnbs, but the thought of people judging me for the words I wrote, wondering if and when I’ll break down again — all my personal history — weighed on me. I didn’t want to preen and perform or deal with hate readers. All I wanted was to create without melodrama.
So, I decided to create an Instagram account under a pseudonym. A whole new identity where no one I know could find me.
Judith Donath, author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online, believes that well-intentioned pseudonyms can enrich our online interactions, contradicting the concept that fake names equal trolling. We’re not talking about creating fake names to deliberately incite hate or rage online; rather, we’re cultivating a separate identity through which we can privately explore aspects of our personality that we don’t need to attach to how others perceive us personally or professionally.
In a 2014 Wired opinion piece, Donath explains that pseudonyms allow us to healthily compartmentalize certain aspects of our identities and lives, and the manner in which we use our real names online differs from how we use them in-person:
In the physical world, space and time separate facets of our lives, providing everyday privacy. Even though you use your real name in conversations you have in person with your podiatrist or pastor, those conversations and opinions are not accessible to your co-workers and neighbors. Online, however, the product review you generously provided for an underarm deodorant or for books about coping with binge eating or bed-wetting, will, if written under your real name, be part of your online portrait, what your neighbors, kids, and random strangers see about you. Online, words persist forever, in vast searchable databases. Anything you say or do using your real name is permanently attached to it.
As social media becomes core to how we want to shape and position our career and the de facto vetting process for employers, the act of publishing under a pen name is becoming commonplace, because it allows us the freedom to pursue passions, communities, topics, and conversations that won’t hurt or hinder our livelihood.
Employed full-time supervising a restaurant in a private athletic club while building an online base camp for travel writers, Kristi Keller (her real name) publishes unfiltered, controversial essays under a pseudonym to protect not only the identities of the people she features in her stories, but also herself. Her pen name gives Keller the freedom to explore scandalous, controversial topics that she wouldn’t ordinarily tackle under her real name. And the rewards of readership and earnings have followed suit, though not without their challenges. “My pen name writes mostly for shock value, and she wins by a landslide in readership,” Keller says. “On the plus side, I don’t need to figure out how to filter myself anymore, because I now have a place to write without filters.”
We used to document our lives in photo albums. Hand-selected photographs affixed to gummy paper told the story of our minor moments and our major triumphs. We dusted off our albums during holidays and dinner parties, much to everyone’s chagrin. We had our printed, private photos and our memories, but now we live in an era where living and publishing publicly have become synonymous. According to Statista, our constant desire to communicate and share has reached a fever pitch: “In a 2019 internet minute, global online users sent over 41.6 million mobile messages and 2.1 million snaps.” Every day on Facebook, “350 million photos are uploaded, with 14.58 million photo uploads per hour, 243,000 photo uploads per minute, and 4,000 photo uploads per second.”
We’re sharing that which was once private: our politics, values, and beliefs; our families, celebrations, and heartbreaks; and every unfiltered thought and emotion — all in real time.
Are we slowly, unbeknownst to us, forging a complete narrative of ourselves online? That a part of our lives — once mysterious and inaccessible, relegated to the shelves and storage boxes in our homes — can now be relived in minute detail with a click of a mouse, formed by not only ourselves but also our friends, neighbors, lovers, family members, and strangers around us? Under our real names, can we ever make a clean break from the people who know us in real life? As Kate Eichhorn wrote in the New Yorker, “Now that the internet is more permanent, and more pervasive, it’s hard to avoid the relics of our past identities.”
Small is mighty when it comes to conversations and connection.
Instead of revisiting the life I’d built under my real name, I chose the freedom to share the life I’m living right now under a pseudonym. I have two Instagram accounts, which I visit only on a weekly basis — one is private and documents my adventures roaming the ocean, desert, mountains, and wine country in California, and the other focuses on my passion for sustainable living. Weeks pass before I post images. I rarely post videos. I’ve learned to be protective of the parts of myself I no longer want to share online. And I use this new space as a forum to start conversations in hopes that they’ll turn into real, in-person friendships.
I average 30 followers per channel, paltry compared to the thousands of followers I had once commanded, but small is mighty when it comes to conversations and connection. Long DMs that start with sustainable fabrics end with our mutual concern about losing work in the midst of the coronavirus. The new online friends I’ve met under my pseudonym have become offline confidantes. At first, they’re confused by my pen name, but when I explain how I got to this place, they get it, because in a culture where every moment of our lives is documented by ourselves and others, it feels good to be private, to carve an identity over which I have a degree of control. While my social media presence is far from what people would consider impressive, it’s real.
No longer do I have to deal with the telenovela drama of unfollowing real-life friends — the very act of unfollowing people I knew was considered a hostile attack, while the reality is that I don’t care for what you share. No longer is my presence performative, because I have no one to impress and my history hasn’t followed me. I’ve no interest in resuming Facebook and Twitter, because those accounts have never served me personally or professionally, and I have learned that you can be informed and diligent about what’s going on in the world without engaging in real-time rage blackouts or fights with irate randoms. You don’t have to keep up with that old friend from college whose updates make you feel that they might have always been a stranger.
Although I’ve deleted my old Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, I know that my images, words, and moments persist and would be nearly impossible to erase. I’ve also learned, firsthand, that the internet can be a cruel place to share your true self. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the mountain of friends I lost as a result of my public, embarrassing breakdown didn’t hurt. It does. It will always hurt, but instead of picking at old wounds, I chose to bandage myself up and move on.
I choose to focus on the people in my life who accept all of me, offline, not just the “perfect” and convenient parts. I choose to build real relationships with the people I meet online, and because I consider social media to be a tool rather than a conduit for meaningful connection, I rarely spend time obsessing over the highlight reels of someone else’s life and follow only a handful of strangers who inspire me. No more mindless scrolling. Social media is no longer my appendage.
