Anonymous User asked: does Heather Flowers exist?
kinda? ish? yes? no? maybe? it's complicated
the whole "heather flowers does not exist" thing came out of a period when i felt really hemmed in by my Online Brand, and attempts to do things outside of that brand would result in people jokingly "correcting" me for not doing my own posts right. when i stopped CAPS-POSTING so much, there were several people who responded by telling me "you forgot to turn caps lock on," which felt... weird, y'know? like i'm the one making these posts, it's impossible for me to do it wrong because the only thing i'm trying to do is make the posts i want to make. so i started to separate myself from my online persona more and more, claiming that the version of me that was online "did not exist" as it had become less of a funny persona and more of an egregore in an uncomfortable identity-shredding way. anyways it turns out that my identity being connected to the internet like a raw nerve is bad, and completely disconnecting it and pretending that nothing online matters to me and that my external self is just a shell is ALSO bad, so now i'm just kinda in the middle. maybe i'm just some guy, y'know?
anyways heather flowers "doesn't exist" in that i remain a very private person when it comes to my online affairs, but also she kinda does exist -- i'm here, i'm making posts, i'm reading them. less of a shell, more of a skin.
