Six years ago I had a perfectly serviceable secret social media identity. Killing off  that imaginary person was way harder than I expected. Much harder. I can’t even remember why I started with the pseudonym in the first place. I think I was speaking truth to power to agents, back when agents blogged.

It was time to stand up and march behind my real name in social media. If I couldn’t say, blog, or tweet something with my name attached, that’s a good indication that I shouldn’t be saying it, blogging it, or tweeting it in the first place. It’s easy to be a dick when you are anonymous.

My alter ego is dead. (Although the inactive Twitter account for my alter ego still has three times more followers than my neglected titular account.) If I ever bust out of query purgatory, I will be a brand. With great branding comes great responsibility.

Using my real name, I have been very cautious to not be a dick in social media. I treat everyone with respect. I never call out fucktards.

…

Sorry. **sniff**  Had to recover from laughing there for a moment. Branding, schmanding. There are plenty of my middle fingers cached into comment threads across this great land. Whoopsie. Paging Doctor Control, Dr.Self Control.

My friend has been unemployed for a long time. An uncomfortably long time. Lots of interviews but still no job offers. She googled her name yesterday. Mystery: Solved. Googling her real name brought back results on several alter ego blogs and twitter feeds. Probably not the kind of blogs and Twitter accounts you’d want prospective employers to read. Ouch.

Sweat beaded on my neck as my fingers tapped my name into the search bar.

Results populated my monitor. My inner Ned Flanders cheered. “Thank you, Jesus!”

Shawn McDonald, the Christian singer, was mixed in with my search results the last time I searched myself. Perhaps ten years ago. Today he buries me. He’s three solid pages of google results. My image doesn’t show up until after hundreds of photos of troubadour Shawn McDonald. And the picture of me that eventually displays is probably the best picture I’ve taken in my life.

I could not be more thrilled to be Number Two!  (Or six. Or twenty.)

My branding gets another lease. Another life. +1Up. The day will come when I have to wrestle my way up the search results pyramid. Maybe. At least I won’t have to worry about damage control and quashing five year old snarky comments from the top down as I climb from the bottom up.

Since my novel is a moral tale about what can happen when you aren’t thinking about the long term, social media repercussions, it’s all quite ironic.  Ironic with a happy ending.

I hope.