On Writing Under a Borrowed Name
For years I posted under Durden. If you know the reference, you know what it was promising — the part of you that doesn’t care what the room thinks, the one willing to burn the comfortable thing down to see what’s underneath. A borrowed name is a strange kind of honesty. You hide your face precisely so you can stop hiding your thoughts.
People assume masks let you lie. In my experience they do the opposite. They let you say the true thing you’d otherwise dress up. With my real name attached, every sentence runs through a small committee. What will employers think. What will family think. Is this on-brand. The committee is sensible and it is the enemy of anything worth reading. The borrowed name fires the committee.
Tyler Durden’s whole argument was that the things you own end up owning you. Same goes for identities. The CV is a thing you own, and slowly it owns you — you start making decisions to protect the story instead of to find the truth. A pseudonym is a way of setting the story down for a minute to see what you actually believe when nobody’s keeping score.
But there’s a second move, and it took me longer. Eventually you take the mask off and own the thoughts in daylight. The borrowed name is training wheels for candour. It teaches you what you sound like when you’re not performing. Then the real work is sounding like that as yourself, with your name on it, where it costs something.
My old bio said: credentials don’t give me value, my thoughts do. I wrote that behind a mask. The harder version is living it without one — standing behind the thoughts when there’s a face attached and a reputation on the line. That’s the graduation. Not anonymity, not performance, but the rarer thing in the middle.
The first rule of having real thoughts is that eventually you have to talk about them.
p.s. — yes, I know naming the rule breaks the rule. Durden would’ve appreciated that.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.