GOOD has a funny article today called "The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle."
Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL.
True fact. Those were embarrassing times. So... I'll go first! My original handle, circa like 1994, was AliCat123 (I am what I am). That account is apparently still open (how the fuck do I close a paid AOL account I am not actually paying for?) and recently started spamming my old address book, which has made for some awkward email exchanges.
