Spend enough time around kink, nightlife, music, drag, or any other collection of weirdos who have decided the name on their birth certificate is merely a suggestion, and eventually you realize you have no idea what half your friends are legally called.
Then somebody tells you.
“His real name is Kevin.”
Kevin? Absolutely fucking not.
I have known that man for four years. He has been introduced to me, saved in my phone, tagged in pictures, and discussed in entirely too many stories under a name that sounds like he should be commanding an army of the damned. You cannot suddenly tell me he is Kevin. I reject Kevin.
This happens more often than you would think once you spend time in communities where scene names, stage names, handles, and nicknames are normal. At first, the alternate name sounds like exactly that, an alternate name. Then people actually start using it. Friends know you by it. New people are introduced to you with it. Someone inevitably shortens it into yet another name without asking, because apparently we are incapable of leaving anything alone.
Eventually someone uses your legal name and everybody looks around wondering who the hell they are talking about.
That is when the idea of a “real name” starts getting interesting.
The First One Wasn’t Exactly Our Decision
Most of us were named before we could hold our own heads up, much less offer meaningful feedback.
Our parents picked something, filled out the paperwork, and that was that. Maybe you love your name. Maybe you hate it. Maybe your parents got creative and condemned you to spelling it aloud at every pharmacy counter until death.
Either way, you probably did not choose it.
The name is only the beginning. We also spend the first part of our lives absorbing ideas about who we are supposed to be, often long before we are capable of questioning any of them. Families have expectations. Communities have expectations. Religion can come with an entire fucking warehouse of expectations.
I grew up deeply religious, and when you grow up inside something like that, it can be difficult to tell where your own beliefs end and the programming begins. I did eventually leave that environment, but leaving did not cause every rule I had learned to evaporate on contact with the outside world.
I could stop believing something intellectually and still discover years later that I was judging myself by it.
What should a woman wear? What makes someone respectable? What kind of sex is acceptable? What kind of person am I supposed to be? What am I allowed to want?
For me, getting out was not the end of that process. It was the first time I actually had enough room to start sorting through it.
That shit can take a while.
Then You Get to Find Out Who You Actually Are
This is the part I like.
Because once nobody is standing over you with a clipboard grading your humanity anymore, you get to start asking better questions.
Do I actually believe this?
Do I actually hate that?
Do I really think this is wrong, or did somebody tell me it was wrong so many times that I eventually stopped checking?
Do I want to dress like this?
Do I want to go there?
Do I want to fuck him?
Her?
Them?
Several of the above?
Suddenly the answer can be based on what you actually want instead of what somebody convinced you a good person was supposed to want.
For me, that process showed up everywhere. Music, clothes, sexuality, kink, relationships, creative work, all of it. There were parts of myself I had never really been given much opportunity to examine because I already thought I knew whether they were allowed.
Then Satanica showed up.
Not fully formed, apparently, because I have already renamed the bitch twice.
Satanica Has Had Three Names Because I Cannot Leave Well Enough Alone
She started as Satanica Sexus.
At the beginning, Satanica was primarily connected to my NSFW side and sexual expression. The name fit what I was doing, and I liked it.
Then Satanica started escaping containment.
She was not just sex anymore. The identity started bleeding into other things I cared about, so I changed the name to Satanica Luxuria. It gave her a little more room while keeping the same decadent, sinful flavor I liked.
Eventually that started feeling too specific too, so I cut it down to Satanica Lux.
Three names, same woman. I was not killing off characters and replacing them every time. I was figuring out what this identity meant to me while I was already living inside it.
Satanica had started as one part of me, then slowly became the name attached to writing, kink, nightlife, fashion, creative work, sex, opinions, and whatever other questionable decisions I decide deserve documentation.
Lux fit better.
Could I change it again someday? Technically, yes. Have I finally stopped fucking with it? I certainly hope so.
Sometimes a Scene Name Means Everything. Sometimes It Means Absolutely Nothing.
This is important because people can get very serious about identity, and occasionally we need to calm the fuck down.
Not every chosen name represents a profound journey through the human soul.
Sometimes you needed a username and the good one was taken.
Sometimes somebody called you something stupid at a party fifteen years ago and your friends refused to let it die.
Sometimes you chose a name because it sounded sexy.
Sometimes you chose it because it sounded threatening.
Sometimes you combined two words that seemed incredibly cool at two in the morning and woke up the next day having apparently named yourself after either a black-metal band or a prescription medication.
All valid.
The only advice I would give somebody choosing a scene name is to imagine other people actually using it. Not just typing it underneath a flattering profile picture.
Say it out loud.
Imagine introducing yourself.
Imagine somebody yelling it across a crowded room.
Imagine your friend shouting it across a Publix because they spotted you near the frozen pizza.
If you can survive that, you have probably chosen well.
And if you have already named yourself Lord Fuckhammer and only considered the Publix test afterward, stand by your decision. Cowardice will only make it worse.
Privacy Is Also a Perfectly Good Reason
Not everybody who uses another name is reinventing themselves. Sometimes you just do not want every part of your life connected to the same Google search.
That is reasonable.
Kink is one obvious example. Somebody can be completely comfortable with what they do and still not want their employer, extended family, clients, children’s teachers, or neighbor who keeps borrowing the hedge trimmer to know about it.
That is not hypocrisy. It is having boundaries.
We do this in less dramatic ways all the time. People behave differently at work than they do with their closest friends. Your grandmother probably receives a different version of your vocabulary than the bartender at two in the morning. Human beings have context.
Using another name can simply create a little separation between contexts.
It can also give somebody space to explore something before deciding how much of the rest of their life they want connected to it. You do not need to send out a fucking press release because you went to your first kink event.
So Which Name Is Actually Real?
Legally, this is very easy to answer. There is a name on my identification, and I strongly recommend using that one when dealing with banks, courts, the IRS, and anyone else capable of ruining your afternoon through paperwork.
Socially, it gets fuzzier.
There are people who know me primarily as Satanica. There are people who call me Satanica without thinking about it. They know my personality, my work, my opinions, my relationships, my sense of humor, and probably an unfortunate amount about my sex life.
They are not talking to a character.
Satanica is me.
So is the woman with the legal name.
One did not become fake because another name entered the picture.
That is probably the thing I misunderstood about alternate identities when I was younger. I thought becoming someone else required abandoning who you already were. Now I think sometimes you just discover that one name was never going to contain the entire fucking operation.
The Best Part Is What Happens After You Get Out
There is trauma somewhere in my story. There is religion. There is shame. There are years of trying to figure out which thoughts in my own head actually belonged to me.
All of that matters.
I also refuse to make it the most interesting thing about what came next.
I got out.
Now I get to decide what I believe, what I wear, where I go, what I create, who I love, who I fuck, how many of them I fuck, and what I call myself while I am doing it.
That is not the sad part of the story. That is the fucking victory lap.
I may spend the rest of my life occasionally finding some ancient piece of programming hiding in my head and going, “Jesus Christ, are you still here?” Fine. I can deal with that.
It does not get to make the decisions anymore.
Maybe that is why I have such a soft spot for chosen names. Sometimes they protect us. Sometimes they let us perform. Sometimes they help us explore. Sometimes they are ridiculous. Sometimes they become important enough that hearing our legal name feels almost weird.