my name is clio and I'm having an existential crisis

[jlh]

I don't really like posting when I'm having an existential crisis, but I'll lay out a few thoughts that have been swirling in my head over the past 24 hours:

1. There's been a spate of LJ hacking, shoebox being the latest. I would rather that my email and LJ not be hacked.
   
2. Later in folk's journal it seemed that what I have to do is memorize 40 strings of random numbers and letters that have no actual meaning to me or anyone else, without ever writing them down, while also memorizing an additional 40 strings of random number, letters, and symbols so that I have alternate answers to the "did you lose your password" questions.
   
3. Problem: I can't memorize random numbers, letters, and symbols. I remember phone numbers as patterns on the keypad. I remember dates because of their place in the continuum of history--it's sort of a multidimensional timeline in my head. I've never been able to memorize formulas; instead I remembered what the formulas meant, so that I could rework them out when I needed the formula. I figure out all percentages using algebra, for example, and geometric formulas have a certain logic. Logic is how I got through calculus, not rote memorization
   
4. Therefore, I'm doomed to be hacked.
   
5. And then on metafandom, I read a horrible story about someone's entire online life being hacked by some real-life stalker who has now spread around fake confessions about being a plagiarist.
   
6. And then I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm frankly not important enough for anyone to hack my LJ; I'm not a big enough target. After all, I've never even been harassed for my unlocked RPS, and that happens to everyone. I am a very small fish.
   
7. And then I feel bad about that, because I have friends who are very popular, and it's not like being hacked is the price of being popular, or anything.
   
8. Still, I've only been mentioned on a hate meme once in the entire time I've been on fandom. Not because I'm so awesome, but because you gain no social advantage by slagging me off--I'm just not important enough.
   
9. I say not because I'm so awesome, because of course awesome people get mentioned on hate memes.
   
10. And that reminded me of crisis I had during the msscribe mess, where people were all, "she must not exist because I can't google her real name." You can't google my real name. The only thing I just found when I googled my real name was my signature on an ecard for John Edwards when he quit the race.
    
11. And since I'm adopted, I don't even know anyone who was present when I was born. I have to trust the state of Maine that my birth certificate is correct, that I was born when and where I say I was.
    
12. True story: when my father and I went to get a copy of my birth certificate, so I could get my first social security card (I was about 12), we didn't realize that all the information had been officially changed when I was adopted. That is, on my birth certificate are my adoptive parents and the name that they gave me. We were trying to get it under my birth name as listed on my adoption papers--which also isn't real, since it was a closed adoption.
    
13. Which means that I don't actually know my real name, because I haven't looked up my birth parents, and my birth certificate, in a sense, isn't real at all.
    
14. So all of this is a fake. There is nothing about me that is verifiable. Some of you have met me, so you know there is a person of my general appearance who answers to my name, and I have a social security number and I've filed taxes and I have a passport, but any or all of those things are easy to fake, right?
    
    So how do you know that you even exist?