In the beginning, it’s just a username. A quick decision. A box to fill.
You’re signing up for your first email, or maybe a photo-sharing app that just launched. You type “jennifer.gledhill,” because it feels clean, professional, and unmistakably you. The dot is deliberate—a little space for clarity between your names. You don’t think twice.
But time has a way of assigning weight to even our smallest digital choices. What was once a casual act of naming becomes something more permanent, more revealing. Years pass, platforms shift, but there it is: jennifer.gledhill—still tagging your comments, still sitting in the “To” field of old email threads, still embedded in the metadata of a forgotten blog post or a university project PDF hosted on a public domain. Like a fossil, it remains even after the original ecosystem fades.
We live in a world increasingly defined by our digital aliases. In a time when identity is fragmented across platforms and personas, usernames act as anchor points. They’re our digital signatures, our online call signs, our identifiers in systems that often know us better than we know ourselves.
Take “jennifer.gledhill.” At first glance, it seems utilitarian. No numbers, no ironic pop culture references. No cutesy misspellings or anonymous handles like “moonbaby420” or “quietstorm_x.” It’s just a name—first dot last. But that simplicity is what gives it staying power. It transcends trends. It’s readable, searchable, and above all, rememberable.
The dot in the middle isn’t just punctuation. It’s symbolic—a pause, a breath, a small break in an otherwise seamless digital self. It’s the difference between a name and an identity. In analog life, we rarely think of ourselves as a string of characters. But online, syntax is destiny. A period between names means you wanted legibility. You cared about how you were seen.
Think about all the places that username has lived. Maybe “jennifer.gledhill” started as an email on Hotmail or Gmail. Then it migrated to a LinkedIn profile, a GitHub account, a Medium blog. Then maybe to a university server login, a customer portal for an airline, a government services ID. Over time, it begins to represent not just a person, but the lifecycle of that person in the digital age—academic Jennifer, early-career Jennifer, travel-hacking Jennifer, homeowner Jennifer, mother Jennifer, remote-worker Jennifer. A string of selves, stitched together by that dot.
We don’t often choose our legacy, but usernames are one of the few ways we write our names into the long scroll of the internet’s memory. They’re practical tools that quietly accumulate history. You may delete the app or abandon the blog, but someone out there still has your handle in their contact list. A bot may still crawl your username on an archived webpage. A teacher may still have your name saved in a forgotten classroom forum. You’re gone—but the username remains, a tiny, blinking cursor where you once were.
Sometimes, a username is aspirational—a version of ourselves we’re trying on. Other times, it’s reactionary—created in frustration because our preferred name was already taken. And yet, no matter how temporary they seem at first, usernames are among the most durable fragments of ourselves we leave behind.
That’s because the internet is bad at forgetting. A username that once unlocked a MySpace profile or a DeviantArt gallery may still exist on some dusty corner of the web. These aren’t just logins; they’re digital relics. And for those of us who lived through the early internet, each username tells a story. Not just of who we were, but when we were.
There’s also a strange intimacy to usernames. Unlike real names, which are given to us, usernames are chosen. Even if we’re just selecting our actual name in a clean format—like “jennifer.gledhill”—we’re still performing a kind of authorship. We’re deciding how we want to be seen, how we want to be indexed by machines and remembered by people.
And while real names are shared—there are thousands of Jennifers and dozens of Gledhills—jennifer.gledhill is specific. It’s likely one of a kind in the context of a single platform. It becomes yours, in a way your legal name never quite is.
But what happens when the identity no longer fits?
That’s where the legacy piece comes in. Sometimes we outgrow our usernames, but we can’t outrun them. They become ghost tags, linking our past selves to our current lives. Maybe “jennifer.gledhill” wrote strong opinions on Reddit in 2011 that current-day Jennifer wouldn’t co-sign. Maybe she joined Facebook groups or mailing lists she no longer agrees with. But the name remains. The dot remains. The breadcrumb trail is visible for anyone with time and curiosity.
It’s not unlike graffiti in a bathroom stall—your name etched into the wall of cyberspace. Sometimes you forget it’s there until someone else points it out. “Hey, aren’t you jennifer.gledhill? I think I saw your post on a design forum five years ago.”
You smile. You nod. Maybe you cringe a little.
But there’s something strangely beautiful about that permanence too. In a world of fleeting content and disposable trends, usernames offer continuity. They connect the teenager learning Photoshop to the adult running design sprints. They connect the student writing blog posts at midnight to the professional giving conference talks a decade later. They connect us to ourselves—versions we may have forgotten, but which still whisper in the background of our digital life.
And that brings us back to the dot.
That tiny punctuation mark, placed between two parts of a name, becomes a dividing line between the analog and the digital, the present and the past, the personal and the public. It’s a separator, yes—but also a connector. It links who we were with who we’re becoming. It lets the world know: this isn’t just a random handle. This is me, distilled into code.
So when we talk about identity in the digital age, let’s not overlook the small things—the characters we choose, the dots we place, the names we repeat until they stick. Because in the end, we are the sum of our chosen identifiers. And sometimes, those identifiers outlive us. They become our digital legacy.
