/The Life of a Pseudonym

I've used pseudonyms for seven years.  Over those years, those names have changed, often, sometimes over the course of a conversation. In the beginning, it was strange having a fake name. I was acutely aware of its hilarious fakeness.  I knew my real name - people in my life called me by my real name - so any other name seemed paranoid and absurd. But over the years, after a steady stream of names, I've become nameless.  My name's become fluid and arbitrary, detached from the thing it references, from me.  I am who I am, but my name's ceased to matter.  Or it did, until recently.

I guess I was predisposed to namelessness, because I've always preferred anonymity in my day-to-day life.  I live in a city because I can move through crowds unnoticed. I like strangers and strange places and transitory stopping grounds, like airports and train stations and subways.

It started slowly in the beginning. I was given a stage name for fetish work, which felt silly and unnecessary until I had a brush with a client who tried a little too hard to pry into my private life. I learned quickly how important it was that I keep my private life separate from the sex world, so from that point on, I created a thick, sharp boundary between the two.  That created a split in my life, which would deepen and expand over time.  I met clients who knew me as Cassidy, and I dated men who knew me by my legal name.  It was simple to keep those lives separate, because I was only Cassidy in hotel rooms and the occasional fetish studio. When I left, I became myself again; I lived with my real name, I carried it with me.

When I went on to work as a call girl, it was similar, at first.  There was the same separation between the identities, defined by time and space, this time between the licit and illicit.  In a hotel room, I was Marie, or Molly, or Maxine, but when I left that hotel room, I was myself again.  I slipped out of my dress and into a pair of jeans and a tank top, and I was back to who I was.  My legal name, however, was becoming a liability. If someone knew my real name and discovered what I was doing at night, I knew that my life could be irrevocably damaged, and over time, the sound of my name made me flinch. So to save myself the paranoia, I began to phase out my name by pulling away from the people who knew it, and I moved toward the strangers whose grasp of my identity was through a veil of anonymity.  So I was Marie or Molly or Maxine, and when I returned home, I was nameless.

Except when I blogged.  Then that name was my new real name, the name under which I was the most real.

When I settled in as a courtesan, a kind of professional mistress, the boundaries between love and commerce were blurred, which meant that the double life was blurred as well.  Now nothing changed when I left a hotel room - I was still Anne or Alexa or Alphonsine outside of the hotel room. I kept different luggage tags to keep up the appearance of that alter-identity, in case a client checked to verify my name. I left my driver's license and passport at home or in my hotel-room safe and traveled only with cash.  I made reservations under a fake name. I answered the phone with a fake name.  And I was happy that way.  I was me, but untraceable. I interacted with the world, but on my terms.  If I wanted to disappear, I could, and the world would never find me.