One Name, Two Faces: Dealing with a Different Sort of Identity Theft
I have this theory that a lot of the world’s hate comes from a fear of identity theft. Not the steal-all-your-money, hack-your-accounts stuff (that happens to everyone at some point or another, welcome to the 21st century), more along the lines of the “this represents who I am” stuff. Because when so many of us are out there fighting on every front for an equal slice of the pie, it’s easy for one person’s win to feel like a loss of opportunity to many others. This is B.S., of course, but the feeling is no less real.
In my work life, I got over this concept very quickly. In-fighting between women has been a longstanding societal “expectation” thanks to the idea that there’s only room for a disproportionately small handful of ladies. Working on the Internet, I see — and work alongside — a veritable smorgasbord of brilliant, smart, funny, insightful, and talented women, all with myriad opinions, thoughts, strengths, points of view, and styles. It brings me such joy to see the camaraderie and network of support so many women writers and creators have crafted online. In so many ways the Internet is the great uniter.
…Except for that time it brought me face to face with the Alicia Lutes that replaced me.
Nearly my entire relationship with Alicia Lutes is online. See, Alicia Lutes isn’t just my name, it also belongs to my half — or is it step? We still don’t know the real answer, actually — sister. A now-woman in her early twenties, we actually met a handful of times as children (though she does not remember). My father would bring her to our house to swim in the pool and play while he and Alicia’s mother would “talk” alone.
I both loved and hated Alicia from second one. How could I not? To meet someone else with my name was both a novelty and a shock to me, because as common as the name “Alicia” has become today, in the 90s I was the only one in my whole town. And I liked it that way.
Little Alicia — as I called her — and I shared a lot of the same qualities: we were loud and aggressively joyful. We both sang and had a flair for the dramatic. It was hard for me, at age 8 or 9, to wrap my head around both liking and disliking something at the same time. When my father disappeared with Alicia and her mother a year later — my father telling me he named Alicia that “to replace me” (the man’s a gem, what can I say?) — those feelings for all parties involved very quickly descended into pure hatred until I learned the toxic art of burying and forgetting how one feels on the inside.
Ten years after my father’s up-and-disappearance, Alicia friended me on Facebook. I had just moved to New York City, had an interesting-sounding job, and was knee deep in the “declaring yourself” journey that is your post-collegiate early twenties. I was carving out an identity I thought would finally define me and usher me into the world as the ass-kicking feminist comedy writer I always wanted to be.
I think I accepted Alicia’s friend request out of sheer curiosity (and, let’s be honest, a subconscious desire for emotional self-flagellation). Throughout the years, I’d occasionally happened upon Alicia’s life on various social medias: Myspace, message boards — the normal tweenage hangouts of the early-to-mid aughts. But this was the first time she was injecting herself into my life with intent and purpose.
Several weeks later I was approached by a journalist to talk about a crime that involved a kid from my hometown. I’d stupidly tweeted-and-deleted about how this particular person had bullied me in middle school and she’d hopped on it with the quickness of any journo on a deadline looking for a scoop-y hot take. I wanted nothing to do with it, but she persisted across a whole litany of social medias: Facebook, Twitter, even LinkedIn. She called me at my office, trying to relate. “I saw in your Ask.fm profile and saw you love singing and Evanescence. Me too!” The wheels immediately screeched in my mind: I didn’t have an Ask.fm profile and her suggestion I liked that band felt like slander to my own identity as a music obsessive. I realized what she had seen was the other Alicia’s.
I railed into this woman, hard. At first attacking her own aggressive behavior after I repeatedly said no to her requests for comment, and then for mistaking me for my father’s other daughter and bringing up an emotional scar I was trying to forget — information she clearly did not need to know, but the hysteria effectively brought her campaign to an end. It felt good at the time to yell at someone, anyone, for this ever-present co-opting of my name and my identity. The insecurity about not being the only Alicia Lutes in my world was real.
It’s very easy for identity theft of a hypothetical/theoretical sort to occur online: I see this every day working on the Internet. The hatred many feel towards people, places, or things that they perceive have done them wrong or stolen some part of them, is very real and makes people do very irrational things they wouldn’t otherwise.
I hated Alicia for very stupid reasons: for being a singer, for having the same sort of bedsheets I had (which I found out via a Myspace photo, which is weird but admit it — that is pretty spooky), and for existing enough that people might mistake our online identities for one another. I was also, naturally, more than a bit peeved that my father chose her over me (at least that’s how it felt when I was a child), but that’s a whole ‘nother bottle of snakes.
A quick aside — though I will stand by the validity of my annoyance at constantly getting emails meant for her from those to whom she had to have given her email address out to in order to receive said email in the first place. How hard is it to give someone the right email address? Right?! Alright. End aside.
Looking back, I don’t think my becoming a writer on the Internet — and therefore, in some very small way, a public persona — is all that accidental. I think I’ve just constantly been searching for a way to claim my name, and my identity, as Alicia Lutes; to validate this perceived “right” to be the only Alicia Lutes out there. My case might be a peculiar one, but the sentiment, I think, is no less universal — especially for women. Even in a time where there are more opportunities than ever and the pool that makes up the still-far-from-even-playing field continues to expand, in-fighting for these few spots continues to exist. And so often with those spots comes the need to properly represent what female identity as a whole (a ludicrous fools’ errand for obvious reasons) means. Which is probably why we all sometimes perceive things as a theft — or rejection of your personal brand of identity or what-have-you — when it’s merely another person trying to do the same as the rest of us: to simply be and let that be enough.
I stopped hating Alicia a long time ago, when I let go of the idea that there could only be one of us, and that I had some ‘right’ to be the one-and-only — the Original Recipe. Because even when we self-identify, it’s ultimately for other people. Be it our name, our likes, our positions, our wants but we are all so much more than that, and should therefore not be threatened when a different person reigns supreme. Who you are is amorphous, constantly changing and evolving — and that is a thing that cannot be stolen.
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Alicia Lutes is the Associate Editor of Smart Girls. Find her on Twitter @alicialutes.
