After seeing my pseudonym on Zoom, a client wondered.
Since spring of 2015, I've had Monday morning phone call, and later Zoom meetings, with my best and favorite client, Martin.
Yesterday, I had participated in a Starsky & Hutch discussion on Zoom. I'd put in my name as Charlotte Frost and forgot to check the box to use that name for that session only.
Since my client and I have been talking at least weekly for years, we are very comfortable with each other and know various things about each other's personal lives. We have a mutual admiration thing going. I think he's a great business man, and a wonderful, positive person. With just an assistant, and myself as a freelance bookkeeper, he does a million dollars annually, coaching corporate executives to be great leaders. He thinks I'm wonderful because I'm highly responsible and efficient, and he appreciates the wide and varied background I've had with small business, so I can give sound advice in various situations.
This morning when I got on Zoom and said hello, Martin responded with puzzlement, "This sounds like Regina, but the name says Charlotte Frost." Oops. I know I'd brought up my love of Starsky & Hutch to him once before, but not fandom specifically. I said, "Oh, I was on a Zoom thing yesterday and was using a different name." He asked, "Was this with a client? Or a horse racing thing?" "Actually," I said, "it would a group of Starsky & Hutch fans. Not all of them know my real name, so I used my fan fiction pseudonym." I hoped he wasn't going to ask for details on fan fiction. He didn't. Instead, after a pause, he said with admiration, "Is there any end to the fascinating person that is Regina Moore? I keep waiting for the day when you'll reveal that you once flew reconnaissance missions for the CIA."
Now that's funny. I assured him that I'd never done any such thing. Though, I mused out loud to him, considering that I mostly stayed in my room as a child, and have always pretty much been a homebody as an adult, I do think I've had a pretty interesting life. He certainly thinks so. He finds it interesting that I have a wide range of small business experience, that I love horses and horse racing (ultra passionate about Secretariat), that I go on long road trips by myself, and that I actually drove to my friend's ranch in Montana, with the last 25 miles being on a gravel road. (The latter was particularly difficult for an urban person to compute as something any normal person would really do.)
It is so interesting how others view us, compared to how we view ourselves. One of my high school friends was named Suzana, and in pre-internet times we'd write each other a time or two each year. Every few years, she'd visit her parents from out of state and invite me to their family home in the mountains. On one such visit, she said to me, "Every time I see you, you drop a bomb." I was perplexed by that. But she felt that every time we met, I'd reveal some new "big" thing about my life. I'd moved in with a man that used to be our high school teacher. I bought a riding horse. I was going away to the University of Arizona to major in horse racing. Then I was actually owning racehorses via an online partnership. I was writing stories with TV characters and getting them published in something called fanzines. I'd started my own bookkeeping business.
Wasn't Suzana's life also fascinating? Her family came from Czechoslovakia when she was eight years old. She got her U.S. citizenship while we were in high school, and it was very important to her to join the military. She'd had a crush on a family friend -- 15 years older than herself -- and it was a dream come true when she married him. They got an annulment within a few months, because she hated how he treated her as a possession, and she quickly married a fellow serviceman who was far more exciting, and they're still married some 40 years later. Since they were in the army, she's lived in many places throughout the country and in Europe. She's the type of person who keeps in touch, if only peripherally, with everyone she knew in high school. Her weight fluctuated dramatically until she was about 40 years old, when she finally lost it and kept if off via Take Off Pounds Sensibly, and is now one of their iconic members.
But to Suzana, I was the one "dropping bombs" about my interesting life. She's not the only friend or acquaintance to have inferred such.
Perhaps what others actually see aren't the events of my life, but the fact that I am so open about how much I love my life and myself. Somehow, it got to be a naughty thing in society to openly value one's self, and I eventually shed my belief in that self-repression. My life is not any more amazing than anyone else's, but the fact that I'm amazed by it, and so appreciative of it, and openly love it, is perhaps what others sometimes view with awe.
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