Over the years, both before and after I got married and changed my name, I’ve encountered a few other “Me”s. Here are my favourites:

1) My Twin From the Other Side of the World

The main reason I took my husband’s name when I got married is because I liked it better than mine. Another – minor – reason is that my old last name was often mispronounced and misspelled and, after so many years, it really bugged me. However, I received some comfort when I stumbled upon another woman with my exact name online. The funny thing is – she was a writer too! We even had similar writing styles. If she didn’t live on the other side of the world I might have been a bit more creeped out about it than I was. Shortly after I’d Googled myself and found her, she’d Googled herself and found me. We exchanged emails and she was quite charming, though emailing “myself” was very surreal. My name was unique enough that I’d never encountered someone else by that name before. Sometimes I feel like I should email my twin now and tell her, “You win – the name’s yours!”

2) The Bizarro Me

On a certain social network which shall remain nameless, there exists a Samantha Garner who is my age and lives in my city. However, she is very much not me and, if prospective clients Googled me and thought she was me, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t ever hear from them. Don’t get me wrong, whatever Bizarro Me wants to do on her slice of the internet is cool and I don’t begrudge her anything, but it’s why I put a photo of myself up on this site in the latest redesign. My name is my brand, so I want to make sure I’m representing myself accurately. Future clients need not worry – I keep my private life locked down tight on this here internet.

3) The Other Wordscience

The name of my blog, Wordscience, follows a theme I’ve used often in names for things online. It started from a phrase I misheard on TV: “new science.” At the time, it resonated with me. I thought that new science would be a pretty neat thing to experience. The sound of the phrase and its attendant imagery stuck with me, and I used variations of it over the years. So, it made sense that I’d call my blog Wordscience. The problem is, when I went to register Wordscience as a Twitter name, I discovered it already existed – and her name was Samantha too! Fair enough, she got there first. And so WordscienceBlog is my Twitter name. It’s also why I use the word “blog” in the blog’s name even though that’s gauche. Sometimes necessity is the mother of gaucheness.