Username Anxiety

I am normally a very decisive person.  But when it comes to creating a username, I get “username anxiety”.  I don’t know why.  For some reason it is extremely difficult for me to come up with what I think is the perfect, creative, sensible username that I not only want to use from here to eternity, but that other people will think is clever, and not lame.  For example, a couple of years ago when I signed up for Twitter, I spent a lot of time anxiety-ridden over my Twitter account.  I kept trying different combinations…should I try and make it professional?  Creative?  Memorable?  Finally, frustrated, I tried just “Kim” which, of course, didn’t work.  That’s how my Twitter name became “Kimitis”.  It is short for “Okay fine, Kim it is!!”  It isn’t really a disease called “kimitis”.  However, I do think I have discovered a psychological condition. Username anxiety that should be called “kimitis”.  Maybe I should patent it?

Several years ago I made an email address and used a nickname my daughter called me, “momby”.  However, it was taken, so I added “90” to it.  “momby90”.  It was a cute little email until a friend of mine said, “That’s a cute name, but I wonder why you didn’t think you would be a mom until you were 90?  There must be a story behind that!”  Ooops!  How did I go all these years with that email address and never know people could read it that way??

Add this to the fact that my husband has the coolest user name ever!  Who wouldn’t have trouble coming up with a username with all this pressure??  Constantly living in the shadow of the man who came up with what I think is a cool username!  And so, here I am with my next assignment, having trouble with the first step, coming up with a username.  After a good hour of trying a few combinations with my name, nothing is really clicking.  I search through all my childhood nicknames….”kimmy kimmy coco butt”, no, that won’t work.  “Monkey”?  No, too short.  “Scrawny Rodent” (old boyfriend, what a jerk!!).  No, didn’t like that.  “Kimijo”?  No, stupid boyfriend, that one was dumb.  “Peewee”?  “Gunner”?  Some of the usernames I finally came up with were “kltaylor” with 2 available.  “momby90” 18 available.  “kimitis” 13 available.  But what was good?  I know the instructor said we should try and use a derivative of our name so we could be transparent….so, what to do, what to do.  Finally, I remembered a letter I received from one of my favorite uncles.  He had a great sense of humor.  He addressed it to the “Ex-Charlietown Rug Rat” (I grew up in St. Charles, commonly referred to as “Charlietown”).  You know, I put that in the username check website, and it was available on 14 sites!  I liked it, I decided it was a “keeper”.  I also checked something more simple and “transparent” and checked “Thektaylor” and it had 15 available.  So, I now have TWO usernames that I liked!!

The next part was looking for “social media tactics/sites” to sign up for using my new usernames.  Our assignment was to sign up for 15 that we were not already a member of.  Now, some of these sites seemed like they may be fun to sign up for, but, honestly to find 15 social media sites to me, is almost as daunting as finding a good username!  I started with some easy ones that I have always thought would be interesting to join:  ebay, Youtube, LinkedIn and Flickr.  Then I joined LiveJournal, Blog catalog and DeviantART because they looked interesting.  My husband suggested myfitnesspal.com, so I registered with that.  Two sites I thought looked interesting from the list were Delicious, Digg and Library Thing.  Two sites I joined because of my daughter’s recommendation were playlist.com for music, and tumblr, of which she said is for “random things”.  My husband also recommended crosswalk.com, so I signed up for that.  And for my final site, one of the lists had “Hulu” on it.  Now, I have heard other people talk about that and decided that might be fun to try, so I signed up for it.  Whew, this was like an all day project!!