Member-only story
The Five Times I Used a Fake Persona, and Why I Still Do Today
One
I was 10 years old when I created my first fake name. I was on the playground with my little sisters, and like any ten year old, the lure of the playground just wasn’t as shiny as it used to be. The slides were too short, the monkey bars sucked, and even though the swings were still pretty cool, I remembered the distinct feeling that I was getting too old for this nonsense. Still, my stay at home mother needed an activity to get all of her kids out of the house, so the playground was it.
The only cool thing about the playground was seeing all of the names carved into the playground equipment. I lived in a fairly upper middle-class neighborhood at the time; my parents striving to keep up with the joneses, unaware that the 2008 crash was right around the corner. So despite not being able to afford where we lived, I grew up in a nice enough neighborhood that seeing graffiti was a “cool sign of rebellion” that would quickly be covered up by the home owners association. In my mind, carving into playground equipment wasn’t a fleeting act of coolness, it was a sign that you once existed. So what I didn’t know who Sheryl and Jim were; based on their heart carving, their love must have been destined to live forever. Like any kid, I wanted that; to be cool, to be remembered, and to do something my parents would definitely kick my ass for. The last part I was most fearful of, so the only logical answer at the time was to create a fake name.
After sitting upside down on the park bench for half an hour watching my three year old sister act like the woodchips were the best things in her life, I settled on an abbreviated version of my name. An alias was formed, and the next time I visited the playground, I proudly used a rusty nail to scape the name into the playground sign while my mother yapped away on the phone. Morene Sanchez’s name will live in infamy on the playground of Parks Creek; I bet she was a cool chick.
Two
Fast forward a couple of years, and my parents gave into the peer pressure of buying your kid an Apple device they didn’t need. Now, being the traditional christian parents that they were, they attempted to put in parental blocks and do random check-ins on me and my siblings browser history to make sure we…
