*very jessica chastain voice* — BECAUSE IT’S MY NAME

How did y’all choose your Instagram name? Is it a shorter version of your “real” name, maybe with a word to make it cute and available, like “the” or “real”? A cheeky reference to your favorite song or TV show? A phrase describing a thing you do — like “songdestroyer” or “thatthingyoudo”? Or simply your name + your work or play identity  — like “kevinjournalist” or “ellanbc” or “ingridgoeswest” — so people *know* it’s you? When did you set it up, and did you ever change it?

When Twitter was still #thegoodplace, I would have given anything to make my handle my full name, first and last: veronicarajadnya, like it is on IG. The character limit was exactly one letter short and I hated the idea of abbreviating either part of it. No nickname of #Veronica felt right there and I didn’t want to shorten or make easy the last name I’d struggled with (or, I should say, so many yt people struggled with) my entire life. I don’t take the easy route and I don’t think they should either.

After Facebook (my college class was the first of incoming freshman to join after expansion beyond the Ivies), Twitter was the platform I prioritized. I got on it towards the end of college, started cultivating it around the same time I got on LinkedIn, and I didn’t start on Instagram until a little after it took off: I had a job that I ran several socials for, and back then you had to physically log in and out (egads!) of IG accounts and couldn’t easily switch between several like you can now, so I didn’t do personal for awhile and I never really caught up.

That job was in an industry that prioritized the bird app, so I was on there a lot more in general and for my personal “brand,” which was just me tweeting about whatever — feminism, gifs, song lyrics, sexy pictures of other people. For work, I started a new account and grew it to more than 10K in less than a year, and for my personal account, I was never able to grow much of a following. #Ratio, amirite? But I reached out to people, and they reached back, and vice versa. 

I tweeted about music, @’d musicians after shows or about new releases or YT videos, and they’d reach back — the manual “RT” with their own words ahead of it, or auto-retweet when the function came about – @discobiscuits @nicolemoudaber @kaskade. I tweeted @ people talking about the same things, and they’d reply — I connected with the creator of the gif blog #MyFriendsAreMarried over our shared love of Kaskade and we follow and @ each other on IG to this day. 

Right out of college I also posted there my earliest Aquarian Weekly articles, back when I had a political column, The Contrarian – it was atrocious and I thought I knew what I was talking about but I guess we all do at that age, and they were into it. I tweeted other political things, super surface and not too far beyond the mainstream and what I gathered from Reddit and blogs and my non-normie noise friends from high school who always seemed to know more than everyone else. Every day, often several times a day, threading them with the cadence of a poem. 

For a long time, my Twitter handle was @thesmokesignal. Before I started reporting the news for WMCX 88.9FM with Jenine, Alyssa, and Sean, I had started the music/talk/variety show I’d run for three years, called Smoke Signals, “a different form of communication.” I eventually realized that there was a movie of the same name (starring Adam Breach of SVU fame) and that it was not the right or woke thing moving forward, so I wanted to change it to my name. Like a journalist, or a young professional person. But I was short a letter, and I’d been vsrajadnya ever since, which I hated. And to my perverse relief, I no longer have to worry about that…

I’ve had other usernames. My AIM username until that blissful time was over was kohllinedeyes, because I am Indian and because my friend Sarah’s was emptygreeneyes. One of my emails remains kohllinedeyes and is connected to a lot of my favorite logins.

There was a website called FacetheJury, which was kind of like Hot or Not and kind of dangerous maybe for someone our age at the time (12? 13?) but are you a millennial if you didn’t do risky shit on the internet before it got really scary? My name was RonnieRaj, which I’ve seriously considered using for my TW or IG for a rebrand. No one’s gonna know. How would they know?

I was on deadjournal (vs livejournal, which was for normies) and with Steph + Jade over my shoulder created the username evildoublea – the double A was for “Asian Avril,” because I idolized Avril Lavigne and even dressed like her and also sang “Complicated” at the school talent show and at every karaoke to this day. There I learned a lot about music and stayed up late writing and even met a person or two IRL.

There were also these message board groups you had to apply to get into with questionnaires and pictures of yourself, and moderators would decide if you got to join the community of “deviantbeauty” or “notugly,” because apparently we wanted to vie for the approval of and be excluded and bullied by beautiful girls on the internet as well as in real life. Back then you couldn’t just add images to your post; you had to HOST images on Photobucket or some other site to get a link to send in your blog or even in AIM, so sometimes it would take awhile.

Of course, there was Myspace, and for all the little things I remember about high school, including how pissed my one friend was that I purposefully did not give them a candle at my Sweet Sixteen, I could not tell you what my username was on there, as I deleted it outright trying to find a job during a recession. And as for Pinterest and Tumblr, that’s none of your business.

Now, having a shorter, different quirky name on IG, where I for now remain (I’ve been looking at Bluesky, Flashes…I am selfish and tired and don’t want to start over, and community > everything, even though I’m on and off private rn…), feels like it could be a status symbol or effortless cool, or at least a good use of space. Another area to show concise personality with few words. And maybe in these troubled times, be a bit harder to find, like The National song.

I recently tried using my husband’s last name on LinkedIn (which is not my legal name) “to try something on.” Privilege and social capital granted by martial name change? A super common name in Europe? A name equally hard to say but arguably more yt? Would people treat me differently in professional and online life if I had a name that allowed me to easily and shortly tell them more about me while telling them less and also be a surprise?

Maybe (I ended up changing it back because of that SAVE Act bullshit), but I’m too old for that shit and would like to keep using social media for whatever lonely, expressive, manic pixie dream girl reasons someone who grew up with MySpace and did social for work for awhile and yet is not actually that good at social media does, so I’ll keep my name for fear of losing it to one of the few other veronicarajadnya-s that may be out there or to come. Because it’s my name.