insomnia and identity

I've been up all night tossing and turning. finally I turned to my iPhone for company and distraction since sleep no longer seemed possible. twitter is good and bad for times like this. good for an outlet and interactions with others who are also awake, whether due to insomnia as well or simply because they're in a part of the world where the sun has already risen. bad because staring at an iPhone screen is certainly not going to help you sleep.

especially when you come across someone who has taken your Internet pseudonym, changed the spelling slightly, and started a blog and twitter account with it. which is what my bout of insomnia has led me to discover.

about a month ago on instagram I started following someone with a name like hippiemomma. I don't remember now how or why I found her. but I often follow other moms with hippie tendencies, and her pictures looked okay. in my sleeplessness tonight I was scrolling through my IG stream, saw and liked a pic of hers, then noticed she had changed her name to momma_seasons. I looked at her IG profile and saw that she has recently started a blog with the same name as well.

I mentioned the discovery on Twitter and soon someone I follow mentioned he found that the same woman has used the same name to start a twitter account.

this is the first (and hopefully last) time I've experienced something like this. yes, I know the expression "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but I am not flattered. I'm annoyed. and creeped out. I don't understand the kind of shameless unoriginal mind that would do this. she should be embarrassed to even consider stealing my name and changing it ever so slightly, pretending it is her own. it is creepy and upsetting. I would like her to stop it.

the whole thing has made me feel that it is important that I speak out. not just about this dumb little copycat. but about all things. I've spent many years being quiet and afraid. there have been people in my life who have tried to shame me into oblivion. my efforts to hide only from them have made me hide from almost everyone and everything.

I know there are millions of blogs in the www and this blog and my voice through this blog is but a tiny blip. but we all need to feel safe being our authentic selves. no one should feel like they need to hide.

especially not behind a stolen name.

with that in mind I am going to make an effort to update this blog on a somewhat regular basis. starting with this post.

and now I will put down my phone and try to get some sleep.

I hope you have a lovely morning and a great day. bye for now.

____________________________\\


p.s. update to the story as of this evening: I confronted her about it and she claimed she doesn't follow me, the name change had nothing to do with me, and she has too many followers to notice any individual likes or comments. I took a look at my statigram stats (a very handy service that compliments instagram nicely) and in the past couple of days she unfollowed me. she had been following me as "hippiehousewife". then she unfollowed me, changed her name to "momma_seasons" and claimed she had never heard of me.

it is all just so icky and sleazy. above all else I'm deeply dismayed that creepy lying unoriginal phonies like this woman exist and go about their lives seemingly without shame. is this normal? is it common?

writing about it is cathartic.
I'd like it better if she'd just stop using the name. but that's not likely, as she seems convinced she has done nothing wrong. and maybe, technically, she hasn't. but morally I think she has.


as Jack White sings:
"oh well, oh well"

(the photo is a diptic of two screen shots. the top is my statigram lost IG followers from this past week. the bottom is instagram search I did yesterday.)