Living a Double Life

In an initial scene in the recent Spiderman film, the main character, Miles Morales, arrives late to his parent-teacher interview because he was fighting some bad guys. Later that day, his parents hosted a big party celebrating his father’s promotion and Miles was late again after fighting off more villains. His parents snap at him. He almost tells them that he’s Spiderman. But he didn’t and got grounded instead. In his room, he expresses frustration at his double life.

While I’m not a closet superhero, I related to this scene because I live my own double life. There’s my normal life and my writing life. Some of my friends know me as the writing guy others don’t even know that I write. I even adopted an alter ego, “The Internet Gardener”, to further separate my personal identity from my creative one.

While this double life is self-imposed, my writing identity represented a significant identity shift. An identity shift that would be unrecognizable to the people that knew me before. At the time, separating the two identities was a necessary step in order to become the writer I needed to be.

There comes a time when, in order to grow, to reach the next level, I’ll need to tear down the divide. For example, I struggle with sharing my work, especially in my personal networks because of context collapse. Nonetheless, I’m slowly taking the steps to reach that point.