Do you remember your first blog?

Millennials, the internet, and a history of double identities

Snapchat, BeReal, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, Substack, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest – the list of the places where I am regularly present on is endless.

I share photos, gifs, videos, texts of all manners, freely, flowingly, trusting, expressing (even sometimes when I know we should not). My opinions, however silly, stupid, profound, lame, uncool, cringe, unpopular, unrefined, go from my own account under my own names. Prakruti: Mad Millennial: pramankapranam.

But it was not always so.

The first blog I remembering starting was called Nature’s Way, where I put out things under my name, but only the sanitised, impersonal pieces – book reviews, travelogues, the like.

But I am an emotions-and-experiences-first writer – in that I am inspired most deeply from the world around me and my interactions with it. But how could I put that online for the world to read?

Why would anyone care about Prakruti’s life experiences? Would my friends be offended, hurt, angry if they saw themselves in my writing? What about privacy?

There were a million reasons to not put personal writing under your own name, and so when the time to write more personal stories came, I chose another facade – Sakhi Writes. An online identity that I began developing to be able to create a profile in the digital world that was not the same as my own.

An alter ego, who had the creative licenses that perhaps Prakruti did not.

A facade behind which I could hide, when failure would inevitably come knocking, when there would be negative, embarrassing comments and reactions.

Anything that would help detach

And this not just me.

Every millennial writer I know started with an online identity that had little or nothing to do with our real names, identities, or faces. We made up creative, outlandish usernames and handles – Reddit continues to be the best example of these usernames. DragonSlayer, TheChosenOne, BoltFire, Clicked A Story, Brown Girl Chronicles.

Anagrams, derivatives, phrases and clauses, puns and word play – any words would be put together to indicate a personality.

The internet was not a community then as it is now. Even though we, the kids of the 90s, are the first cohort of the digital natives, we still viewed the world online as something impersonal, secretive, separate from our real lives.

It’s a little surreal to think that the mental transformation it took to become okay with having our face and name associated with everything, has only happened in a span of about 7 years.

Is it our own sense of self and confidence that has evolved?

Or a new-found trust in the digital world, which has been claimed by the new generation as a space for them to build their life and communities?

Maybe a mix of both?

Whatever it is, I know there are tonnes of my friends who have abandoned the quest to create separate pages for their work – their own profile being used increasingly as mini personal brands and portfolios. We are dropping the facade, embracing the multiplicity of our identities and hobbies, and hoping that somewhere, somehow, we can make sense of it.

If not, it’s still a safe space for us to share our work, seek validation, and find the fire to do and say more of what we want to.

I don’t think any generation is pressured to seek change, embody and implement changes at the speed with which millennials do. We are of two worlds, and are sandwiched between a generation that had the the liberty to ignore online realities completely, and a generation that has the nimbleness online to appear however they want to, wearing whatever they want to wear, saying whatever average, banal, brilliant, mind blowing things that comes to their mind.

But we are finding our way. Picking our sides.

I know the side of the fence I have chosen.