(no subject)

snippit of this interview that echos something about "old school" online handles/creative alter egos/etc that I found super relatable rn.
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Are people in your personal life aware of your writing?

Some are, but very few. Only the ones I trust, and there are a few reasons for that. It is a secret and it must stay a secret, but even the people I trust a lot, my closest friends, they don’t value the secret the way I value it; it never will have the same eminence or salience, so I want to keep the surface area of the knowledge as small as possible or else the secret has no chance of staying a secret at all.

There are certain people I’ve told, and this was back when I was looser with my identity and would say, “I’m a writing a story,” but if I had known how that’d turn out, I would have told no one. There’s a famous saying that Twitter has a new main character everyday, but you don’t want to be the main character, and if you don’t use your real name, you won’t ever need to become one. 

How has being anonymous impacted your work?

When I first started I didn’t consider myself a writer at all. Online was always supposed to be an anonymous space to me; more and more, we’ve moved to a world where everyone has an online presence and we expect that presence to be continuous with their real life.

…But on old forums online, people had screen names and there was no expectation that it was your real name. People felt it was corny to connect the two. So when I started, it never even occurred to me to use my real name. I was using Twitter as a confession box, I didn’t think people would care who I was, I just wanted to express things to myself, so it was shocking to me that my writings started to find an audience. It was only really months later, when I started posting more often, that I started saying to myself, “I’m a writer,” but even now I don’t see it as a big part of my personality, even though it's become one.

Musicians and painters feel a need to associate themselves with their work, but writers have often separated themselves from it. You say writing isn’t a big part of your identity; what else drives you besides writing?

The same things everyone else is doing. Spending time with my family, walking. I live in an urban environment so I do mundane things, I have a 9-5, I tell extremely politically correct jokes to my colleagues. The tension of being a normie in real life versus having this secret based life actually fuels my writing in some ways, because it’s more interesting to me to have a secret—a labyrinth in the structure of my life to add texture.