My Coming-of-Age, As Seen in Usernames

angelprettypie (2005-2011)

I am five years old, making my first account on the Internet. I wait for my slow dial-up Internet connection to reveal if the Yahoo! ID I entered is taken or not. (Spoiler alert: it is.) I had no idea how common my name actually was prior to signing up: any possible variation of Angel Martinez has already been taken by my Mexican/Spanish namesakes (yes, plural!): boxers, football players, even ex-convicts with their only common denominator being the fact that they were men. Though I am young and have yet to be exposed to all the inconveniences present in the world, my patience wears thin. I force myself to think of any defining characteristic I must have and try to incorporate it into a potential username.

And so I am angelprettypie. For the record, I initially wanted angelcutiepie but it was already registered by someone else. I figure it’s a sign that my beauty transcended mere cuteness. I have no trouble admitting this to myself: I am a very confident kid, the center of attention and the only child of my parents. From here on out, I think of my username as an actual extension of my self (and will continue to do so for years to come). I figure that the best way to know me would be to cut the chitchat and see how I’d describe myself on the Internet, usually in five words or less.

punchdrunkrobot (2011)

Twitter is an emerging site that lets users speak about their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Although I don’t see the appeal in this restriction, I see it is slowly gaining traction and decide to try it out. I am at a time in my life where there is a strange allure surrounding being a grown-up and doing grown-up things. With this comes a demand for incremental allowance increases, later bedtime hours, and permission to change my online identity to something angstier. I am tired of being known as a mistake I made as a kid - it’s time to say goodbye to angelprettypie and hello to punchdrunkrobot. Literally no part of that resonates with me: I have no intention of trying alcohol until several years into the future nor am I interested in robots or anything related to tech. But it gives off the impression that I’m mature for my age and honestly, isn’t that the only thing a kid ever wants to achieve?

bigpurplebox (2011)

Fortunately, my mother thwarts my plans and suggests I go with something more age-appropriate. In my desire to go with the initial adjective + noun format I planned out, I think of bigpurplebox. It may be hard to believe but I actually thought long and hard about this one. (In retrospect, I could have gotten a better result had I consulted a random word generator. Just now, I tried it out and got doublehotdogcrown, which is far superior in ways I cannot explain.)

The events that take place in this particular stage in my life are probably as random as the conceptualization of this username. I bag a spot in the student council and do nothing but remind batchmates to walk in one line on the right side of the corridor. I join our school science club and find out that my religion teacher runs it and thus, there are little to no experiments conducted the entire year. I am voted batch cheerleader for our school-wide intramurals just because I have the loudest voice. I pick up a guitar after watching a friend play Fifteen by Taylor Swift by merely pressing her finger pads on random frets and strumming down-down-up-up-down. I move about life aimlessly but I am satisfied nevertheless: a rare feat.

LittleMissBiebs (2011), angelthedirectioner (2011-2013), angelisnotonfire (2013), 5secsofangel (2013-2014)

Adolescence does not give me the same freedom to dip my toes in multiple things all at once. At this stage, I am expected to find a sense of self despite the ever-changing landscape of my everyday life. One day, I’m 4 feet and 11 inches hanging out with the English-speaking anime enthusiasts of my batch, and the next I’m a wee bit taller with bad acne and a new set of friends. I figure I need to latch on to at least one constant thing to keep myself from going insane and thankfully, like magic, I find idols who make me feel important and loved. I put them up on a pedestal and center my life around them, then buy into the idea that they’re all going to last forever.

First, I am LittleMissBiebs, giving my 20 Twitter followers complete coverage of the six hours leading up to Justin Bieber’s first and only show in Manila. I get noticed by Scooter Braun because I flood his mentions with questions of whether JB has already arrived in my country. Then I am angelthedirectioner, dragging my mom out of the house at 6am so I can dash to the nearest record store the minute they open to buy One Direction’s first tour DVD. While waiting in line, I change my username to this because I feel like I’ve truly earned the title.

Although I am nowhere near over 1D, I am angelisnotonfire for a very, very brief period. I realize I connect best to personalities through music and so I leave Dan Howell and his sexy endscreen dances behind for an up-and-coming Australian band and turn into 5secsofangel. Besides having to affix several last names to my own (you have no idea how hard it is to sign Angel Stypayhorlikson Hemmings-Hood-Clifford-Irwin on everything I own), this point in my life is nowhere as chaotic as I imagined it to be and I know it’s because I find solace in a love that holds more weight than anything in the world.

katstrahtford (2014-2016)

The notion that girls could either be conventionally attractive or have an interesting personality (and never both at the same time) has successfully been implanted in my brain. Being the bespectacled braceface with bad skin that I am, I panic. As everyone my age starts to cling to a boyband as well, I know that part of me cannot make me stand out the way I want to. Then I watch 10 Things I Hate About You for the first time and immediately know that Kat Stratford is the blueprint. 

I don’t know anyone like her, probably because no one my age could be that feisty and fearless and feminist, especially since we study in a conversative Catholic all-girls high school. Plus, she bags the dreamiest leading man in chick flick history in the end. By calling myself by her name on Instagram, I am paying a fitting tribute to her while simultaneously reminding myself to be her.

I listen to rock bands with eccentric names once or twice and claim they are my favorite. I force myself to finish The Bell Jar because she reads it in one scene of the film, even if it is far too depressing for my taste. I channel my angst and try my hand at uppercase Helvetica bold italic underline size 36 type of poetry but end up with half-hearted attempts at narrating heartbreak and longing I have never even experienced. I realize it is not sustainable for a Filipino teen to try to slip into the skin of a fictional white girl. Our preferences, viewpoints, and experiences are not and can never be the same: besides the fact that we live on the complete opposite sides of the world, she’s had her entire life literally written out for her while I am still in the process of doing that for myself.

mynameisangelmartinez, angxlmartinez (2016-2019)

I am frustrated because I am only ever seen through other people. I am a character that cannot stand alone unless associated to someone else—take away the strangely intense hyperfixation, and I am a hollow shell. I change my username to either mynameisangelmartinez or angxlmartinez: the closest I will ever get to my actual name. I want to send the message that I am my own person, although I’m not really sure if I’m trying to convince anyone besides myself. I don’t have a problem with it until I am at the cusp of adulthood.

I have always been under the assumption that when the clock strikes 12 on July 5th, 2018, I will be filled with an unmistakable sense of clarity. All the seemingly disparate pieces of my life will fuse together and reveal what on Earth I was really put here for. But I eventually turn 18 and am disappointed to find out I am no wiser than I was when I was 17: after all, what difference does a day or 30 or 365 even make?

I spend the rest of the year paralyzed. All throughout my five-month break before starting university, I beat myself up for not knowing exactly what I want to do, for planning out every single moment in my life in excruciating detail except for this one. I berate myself while lying on my back and trying to memorize the patterns on my bedroom ceiling. When I enter my dream school, I am expectedly ill-equipped and unprepared. I am nothing when compared to my peers in terms of academics, extracurriculars, or even personality. I am not surprised when I see Liability by Lorde at the top of my year-end pre-made Spotify playlist.

angeltriestoblog, angeltriestotwt, angeltriestogram (2019-Present)

I have been stuck in quarantine for almost three months now and during this period, I’ve done a lot of reflection on the concept of change: the frequency in which it occurs and the control (or lack thereof) I have over it. I think it’s because this pandemic has wiped out everything we knew to be true about this world and plunged us into this grim and dark alternate reality, but I digress. 

Growing up, I remember every change in both my actual and online personas being marked by a protest: the demand for independence as a pre-teen, the distinct adolescent rage rooted in a search for identity, the need for social acceptance as a high schooler, and a general feeling of worthlessness as I approached adulthood. I saw the need for reinvention as an acknowledgment that there was something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with me, when change is actually the most natural, most human process in the world.

How odd of me to hold myself to an impossible standard, to expect that I would be sure of who I was at age 12 or 15 or 18 or even now that I’m almost a month away from 20. And how boring it must be to find a version of yourself at a young age that you love enough to stick with for the rest of your life. If most websites are kind enough to give me the opportunity to change my usernames as many times as I deem fit, regardless of how stupid or random, shouldn’t I be just as gentle with myself regarding my own self-transformation? 

And so I am back to the stage in my life where I am open to doing a little bit of everything. (Turns out Miss bigpurplebox wasn’t so bad after all.) I submit works that usually never make it out of my personal blog to international publications. I try my hand at cooking and realize that I am actually not the type to burn the entire kitchen down within mere seconds. I sing a lot but only when everyone else in the house is asleep because I’m still too shy to let others hear me.

The decision to rebrand and become angeltriesto + [insert social media platform of choice] everywhere had no profound meaning behind it: I did it in the middle of a boring computer class because the opportunity presented itself and I figured it had a nice ring to it. But now I guess it makes sense. I’m living my best life now because I’m just trying everything out and seeing where my options take me. Yes, I’m aware it could possibly turn me into someone I never saw coming but I got my arms outstretched and ready to welcome her anyway.