I started counting and lost track at 23.
Not 23 accounts. 23 versions of me. Some active. Some dormant. All real in the sense that they were created by hands that were mine, typing thoughts that were mine, at moments when I believed I was me.
There’s the me on GitHub commits, repositories, code written in states of flow and frustration. The commit messages range from professional (“fix: resolve authentication bug”) to barely coherent (“fuck this shit works now”). Two different people wrote those. Same keyboard.
There’s the me on Goodreads ratings, reviews, a reading list that tells a story about who I want to be versus who I actually am. The five star books are aspirations. The three star books are reality.
There’s the me on Discord long forgotten, buried under abandoned usernames, opinions I held strongly enough to type and weakly enough to never return to defend.
There’s the me in the analytics of this blog IP addresses, page views, time-on-page data points that reduce my readers (and me) to metrics. The me that Google Analytics knows is more consistent than the me I present to my friends. (ps. i don’t have any of that data now, removed analytics a topic for some other time)
But here’s the thing that kept me up:
Not all of these mes are alive.
Some of them are frozen in time. A forum profile from 2019 that still displays a bio I wrote when I was in high school. The opinions are wrong. The tone is wrong. The person is wrong. But the profile persists. It is a fossil. A digital amber trapping a version of me that no longer exists.
And yet, if someone searches for me, they’ll find it. They’ll read it. They’ll form an impression of who I am based on words I can barely recognize as my own.
Which version is the real one? The one typing this now? Or the one that’s been sitting on that forum for 7 years, unchanged, unchanging, slowly becoming less and less accurate with each passing day?
I think about this every time I change my mind about something publicly.
The old posts remain. The old tweets (if I had any) would remain. The old comments, reviews, ratings, they all stay. Each one a snapshot of a mental state that has since moved on.
I am not a person. I am a stratigraphy. Layers of previous selves, sedimented, compressed, visible to anyone who digs deep enough.
And the worst part?
I can’t delete them all. Even if I tried, there are archives. There are screenshots. There are people who read my words and formed opinions of me that I will never know about and cannot correct.
I am not who I am. I am who the internet thinks I was, across all the versions it has captured.
How many of me are online right now?
More than one. More than I can count. More than I can control.
And the question that matters:
Do any of them match the one reading this sentence?