Entries tagged with pseudonymity

Anonymous asked: I'm way older than you 57 but I'm relating to doing heroin in the 90's and in SF and I'm an engineer. I like what you're doing w/ this. The weirdness of being a scientist and a druggie. I also am a poet. And so so clean (17 yrs). Anyhoo. "Thanks for sharing." Um, how do you deal with keeping your professional reputation as a scientist? I get paranoid about that, esp as a female. Do any colleagues know about your drug past? And you have this blog it's pretty out there. Do you change names?

I change all the names. There are no photos of me. I have a whole different set of email addresses.

Of course, anyone who knew me back then could piece everything together. But that’s not really what I’m worried about. I just don’t want any of this to show up on my Google “resume”.

None of my colleagues know about my history of drug use and neither do most of the people I’ve met in the last 10 years.

But that level of secrecy is pretty isolating. So this is basically my place to vent anything that I can’t put on Facebook.

Obviously, it’s not a perfect solution.

"I was WONDERING if Tobias from your last narrative post was your current husband (& hoping that, if not, it was someone else & not Ben)."

—nonvolleyball

Tumblr is weird reverse world, where people know all the most intimate things about me that almost no one in my real life knows, but don’t know who I’m married to.

Also, thinking about how different it would be if I were married to Ben (who quit speed after we broke up, but who is still working at the same coffee shop and who seems to be getting more and more bitter after dating a series of crazy, flaky white girls).

Tobias is the first person I’d dated who had graduated from college, and I think that let me be more comfortable with having gone to a good school and being on a career track, and also made it easier to sweep everything else under the rug.

Not to mention the difference between dating someone who is half-Black and someone who is half-Chinese, and the degree to which Tobias and our daughter are just considered white.

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