Burner Identities

I woke up one day and discovered that I had forgotten all my passwords. I opened my password manager, the one thing I thought I could always get into, and it asked to verify the login by sending a code to my email. I tried to log into that email. Wrong password. Attempted recovery, it pointed to another inbox that I could not access either and that inbox led to yet another in an endless chain. Each step revealed a deeply buried list of accounts that I had created and then abandoned. After a few loops it became obvious to me that I was trapped in the system, not locked out of it.

That was the first clean glimpse of the mess I had built and thrown myself in and under. Tens of email addresses. Burner accounts everywhere, empty and with no history, no engagement, no continuity. All of it in service of one goal: never let any single identity become fully me.

My rationalisation had always been that I was being careful. But what I was actually doing was diluting myself until there was nothing left to hold onto that may represent me, not even to myself. When not a single account (fragment) carries intention, nothing carries consequence, good or otherwise. Over time that erasure compounds. Eventually I couldn't even tell which fragments are real. At some point I stopped feeling like a person.

This feeling was amplified by not having a voice in the real world, either. What's left is the internal voice trying to keep up with all of its fragmentation, even that eventually gets confused and diluted so much that it simply disappears. What remains is a deafening silence, accompanied by the few and far between moments when a word or two echoes within me, giving a fleeting hope that I can walk back the path and undo the damage I've done to myself.

So, a strange impulse came upon me that I must use my real name and put my voice out there, regardless if it's ever heard or not. Simply as a declaration that something here belongs to me, an attempt to pull myself out of the "autopilot" mode I've grown quite tired of, and a way to defragment a self that struggles to describe itself.

"A girl has no name."

As I was setting up this website, this voice surfaced out of nowhere. It's Arya Stark's from Game of Thrones. I had not thought or seen anything regarding that show in years, yet this seemingly random line repeated in head. After it came her other sentence:

"A girl's name is Arya Stark of Winterfell, and I am going home."

I quickly realised the connection my unconscious was making. In the show, Arya wants to become "No One," but to do so she is pressured to strip away her name, her family, her history and her ego. Later when she finally survives her trials, she is told she has finally become "No One." She rejects and states the above sentence with triumph.

My mind also quickly caught onto the shift in her language. She starts with the third person: "A girl," but ends in the first person: "I am."

Having been studying Carl Jung for a while, I realised the following in attempting to understand my situation and the spontaneous emergence of Arya's voice from my Unconscious:

• Those "burner" identities were my attempt to cage my Persona: Jung describes the Persona as a mask we put on to survive the world. I realised that by creating dozens of aliases, I wasn't just protecting myself, but instead I was fragmenting my Ego. I had created so many masks that there was no "face" left to actually wear them. Like Arya, I was trying to be "No One" to avoid the pain and vulnerability of being "Someone," but in doing so I had severed my connection to my own center.
• "A Girl" to "I Am": Jung's idea of Individuation is becoming a whole, indivisible person. In hindsight, I see now that my "autopilot" mode has been a form of dissociation, a life lived in the third person. Now my trajectory is towards inhabiting the "I Am" and finally going Home.