Sunday, June 23, 2013

The missing J

When I was in sixth grade, I decided to start using my middle initial in all my signatures.
 It just felt right.  Whether I realized it or not, this may have been my first concrete effort to be different from other kids. That "J." would continue to set me apart from other women with the same name for the next 18 years; attaching itself to all my professional and artistic credits, and declaring to the world that I am not Ashley the soccer player, the doctor, or the porn star.  Yes.  There's a porn star.  Google it and see for yourself why I don't want our resumes to be confused.  I'll give you a hint: "Bum Plumber".


Then, this year, my cyber stalker happened.  For the purposes of this blog, it isn't really important who this person is or why he's chosen to bother me.  All you really need to know is that the attention is both completely unwarranted and VERY unwanted.  If you've never had it happen to you, you might assume that harassing emails and fake Facebook profiles are a mere annoyance.  To call it annoying is a gross understatement.  Frustrating, depressing, tiresome, nerve wracking, and scary are just a few of the terms I would use, if I'm keeping the language clean.

 Having someone out there spending every spare moment trying to gather information on you, fabricating stories to embarass you professionally, impersonating you on social media networks, and sending you unwelcome correspondence with the intent to make you fearful is exhausting, to say the least. Some of these actions are not only frightening, they're against the law.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5s9lMzMhAU

Yep.  The law.  Wouldn't it be great if we could count on the law to set things right?  As a matter of covering the bases, I filed a police report and gave them copies of everything that has been happening.  I will be delighted if the LAPD proves my assumptions about cops to be incorrect, but I'm not counting on it.  They've got lots of shit to do.
 I did a lot of research about how to protect one's self from cyber stalking.  Since most stalkers are not thinking logically or reasonably, there's often not much you can do to change their minds and get the harassment to stop.  Essentially, you have to put up defense barriers so that they can't reach you, and thus, can't stress you out so much.  It's also wise to prevent them from knowing where you work, which was a big concern for me. The aim is to become hard to track down or contact; invisible to this person's obsessive web searches.  Not an easy thing to achieve in an age when every bit of information gets google archived somewhere.

The number one recommendation to protect yourself is to change your email address.  That really sucked.  Not only was it time consuming to switch all my accounts and whatnot, it also meant I had to kill off the personal art site that had hosted my email. Now all of my business cards provide an address that leads to nowhere.  I am a page not found.

The second highest recommendation is to drop any middle initial you may be using to identify yourself.  Noooooooo!  Not my treasured "J"!  I hated it, but for greater peace of mind, privacy, and personal safety, I had no choice but to strip the J from all of my online presences; etsy shops, portfolio sites, even seemingly benign stuff like Amazon or Yelp. On some sites, I even switched to a complete first and last name alias in order to be even less searchable.  I know, it sounds really nuts.  All I can do is assure you that if you had received some of the 'love letters" I have, you'd want the disappearing act to be as complete as possible too.

I'm bummed over the loss of my J.  Without it, I AM invisible.  I'm lost in a sea of women who share my first and last name, my achievements buried deep under all of their graduation photos, small business listings, office hours...porn titles. While that invisibility has served to shield me from my stalker, it also feels like a punishment to someone who lives to stand out. I feel like an officer who has had his badges and bars ripped off his uniform in a dishonorable discharge....except I didn't do anything wrong! I get to enjoy my full signature once a week, when I deposit my paycheck, and that's it.

I wonder, will I always have to live my life this way?  When colleagues want to add me on linkedin, I have to tell them my user name is an alias.  Eyebrows sometimes raise, and it's embarrassing to explain.  This name situation will no doubt effect the choices I make as I pursue my plush toy making goals.  Can I risk using my name on the tags and packaging, knowing this will add to my searchability online?  Do I use a pseudonym, as some toy artists do, even though I've never been terribly attracted to the idea? It's proving to be difficult to be out there achieving in the art/ business world while also trying to be a ghost.

You may have noticed that I haven't actually typed my full name once in this blog.  That's no accident. Unflattering fake Facebook profiles every few weeks remind me that stalky-pants is still out there, doing his thing.  When one gets shut down, it's not long before a new, even dumber one goes up.  In effort to feel less upset by the whole thing, I try to make it funny.  I imagine him in his mom's basement, wearing a red wig with bangs and a foil hat while he schemes.  It works until I realize it's probably true.

Thank you to the friends who have supported me during what is, undoubtedly, the stupidest thing I have ever experienced.  I hope that someday my J can make a return, and then we will party. My gift to myself will be a giant gold and rhinestone "J" pimp medallion, and there will be balloons for everyone!