I remember the morning I got the e-mail. Mark had titled it "Doppelganger," and wrote, "It is with sadness and anger and a bit of creeped-outness that I bring you the following news: There seems to be someone stealing from your life ..."
Nothing like this had ever been brought to my attention before. What does that even mean, I wondered, "stealing from your life"? I dove into a long-winded investigation only to discover that a girl in Las Vegas had made me the subject of a two-year Internet obsession of sorts, in which she used my photographs as her own, my writing as her writing, and my life-documentation as her personal narrative. She had created a journal account in January 2005 that mirrored my own journal. Occasionally she doctored it up with a few name and place changes. She took paragraphs from one month and spliced them with sentences from another, a sort of "LiveJournal remixing," if you will. As someone with exalted daydreams of being a Writer, seeing my words plagiarized for such a long time felt like a cyber slap in the face, a little too Single White Female for my comfort.
Of 12 pictures, her MySpace profile contained six of me, interjected with blurry photos of the real her. I guess on some basic level we "look alike" since we both have dark hair and glasses, as if we were all South Park characters and something like a simple accessory made us all the same people. Her interests were exactly the same as mine, right down to mentioning my favorite dream about being trapped inside of a giant pierogi.
Perhaps more disturbing than blatantly ripping me off was that in the few-and-far-between places she had used her own information, she seemed like a loser. One acquaintance saw her photographs and summed it up best: "You should mostly feel offended that a girl in the year 2006 who still has an eyebrow ring is trying to pass herself off as you." I would never have a Hello Kitty background or describe anything as "emo" past 1998. Not only did she try to pose as me, she tried to pose as me with terrible taste. I was outraged.
Questions were raised: Didn't her real-life friends notice anything seemed out of line? That her stories about visiting friends and how she spent free time were things she had never actually done? That the three-year-old picture of my ex-boyfriend was obviously a stranger and not her past suitor? How did she explain the distinguishing outfits seen in her photographs that she never actually wore? Since nothing she did was actually illegal, the only course of action I could take was to embarrass her as much as possible. I typed up a form letter of sorts briefly explaining the situation and spent an embarrassing amount of time sending it to each individual friend who was linked to her. In an hour the responses started to come in.
Most people didn't actually know her in real life but still provided sympathy. One of her real-life friends told me, after comparing both of our profiles, that our "pictures kind of look alike, but [I am] over-reacting." (Of course our pictures looked alike; they are my pictures.) There were also those replies that made me question the general intelligence of humanity. "I always thought it was weird that she had some tattoos on the Internet but not in real life."
By nightfall I had rounded up supportive troops. Her friends, skeptical at first, had now come around to the unfortunate truth that their friend had been deceitful not just to strangers online but to them in person. One by one they wrote to her.
At 11 p.m., she deleted her profile and journal sites. Victory was mine. In the end my goal was not to sabotage the life of a girl who obviously needs some sort of help figuring out her own life (we can all relate to that), but rather to take back the mockery she had made of my experiences. Though there is a bit of flattery to be found within all of this—she posted my pictures to web communities for "sexy librarians" and her friends wrote to me to say, "This makes sense—she always seemed prettier and more interesting on the Internet!" Our identity on the Internet is a sort of self-righteous creation. We can edit the bad parts. We can post photographs at exactly the right angle with enough bright flash to hide all signs of imperfection. Profile sites and journals allow us to create an instantly accessible autobiography of our own choosing. The Internet cannot exist on porn alone. The other 20 percent has to come from vanity.
It's still odd to think that somewhere in Nevada exists a girl who feels her own life is so boring she had to steal mine for two years. Isn't Las Vegas supposed to be the most exciting of places? My mother went there to simply get remarried and it was aired on the Discovery Channel. My ex-boyfriend went there and fell in love with a stripper. I've heard the rumors of 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffets and strip clubs and celebrity parties. The town practically writes its own stories! It's the last place I would have expected such an imitation to come from, though on some levels, the most sensible. My personal imposter is right up there with fake New York City and Elvis impersonators.
I have never received an apology from the Imposter. I bet she is still dealing with the shock and embarrassment of being discovered as a phony. She probably believed you all when you claimed what happens in Las Vegas stays there—we've even seen the commercials in Pennsylvania.