Mine was something with the number 47 in it. I don’t remember choosing 47. I don’t have any particular relationship with 47. But at age eleven, faced with the demand to invent a name for myself on the internet, my brain produced that number with complete confidence and I typed it in without questioning it. Somewhere in a server that probably no longer exists, that username is still attached to a profile I made on a forum about a video game I don’t remember playing.
The first username is pure. Nobody had told you yet how to present yourself online. There was no personal brand, no awareness of how the name would look in a bio, no consideration of whether it was searchable or professional or consistent across platforms. You just needed a name and you picked one the way a kid picks a favorite color — immediately, instinctively, from some part of yourself that doesn’t explain its reasoning.
Some people went with their actual name and a number, which says something. Some went full fantasy — DragonSlayer, xXDarkness, some combination of their favorite character and a birth year that they now deeply regret being public. Some went weirdly abstract, like a word that meant something private to them at the time, a reference nobody else got, a little encrypted self-portrait. Those are the interesting ones.
What you named yourself when nobody was watching, before you understood that people would be watching, before you knew that the internet was a place where your choices followed you — that’s a time capsule. It’s a picture of who you were when you hadn’t yet learned to curate who you were. We spend a lot of the rest of our lives online trying to correct for it, sharpen it, make it legible. The first username just was.
I kind of miss that kid with the 47. He seemed very sure about it.