For years I have been a secret media blogger, but I've finally 'come out' and revealed my true identity. My double life is over
Steven Baxter
I am Anton Vowl. There it is, at last. I've been writing the media-watching Enemies of Reason blog for the last three years under that name, but now it's time to say: this is me. I am Steven Baxter, an oafish, lumbering, badly dressed, plump, painfully shy failed writer and not-very-good working journalist, who one day slapped on a new name, took to the keyboard and began writing what I really wanted to say.
That's me, up there – that rather startled-looking bald man. I'll find it strange to see that face gazing out from above these words, rather than my more usual avatar, a photo of a small orange stuffed monkey I bought on holiday in Vietnam. It might be stranger still to see my real name as a byline, as opposed to the allonym I took from the protagonist in Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La Disparition (to be precise, Gilbert Adair's English translation). For the last three years, I've been living two lives, as two separate people – one a writer of growing confidence, the other a bumbling nobody.
Enemies of Reason's audience has grown hugely over the years, thanks to the popularity of posts such as this one exposing the myth of England football shirts being banned in pubs, and thanks to happy accidents such as Stephen Fry tweeting a link to my post about Jan Moir during the Twitterstorm of 2009 (I even got a bit of attention when Howard Jacobson rather petulantly made fun of me in the Independent). Despite all that, no one ever asked me who "Anton" was. It was only last week, when I was asked to appear on the panel at the Newsfutures blogging event in Bristol, that I had a choice: to stay in the shadows, or to turn up and be myself. It wasn't easy, but I chose the latter.
When you set out on your blog adventure, you have to decide whether to write it as you or under an assumed name. Do you want all the hassle and ad hominem that comes from putting your own name and photo next to the words? Do you want all potential future employers able to look up every single one of your blog posts, even the angry and sweary ones, especially the ones about your private life?
There was something else, too. I wanted to write not just about the enemies of reason who are churning out disappointing and misleading stories in the papers, but the enemies of reason inside my head. It wasn't just the Daily Mail that annoyed me, but my own life – that of an angry, depressed, occasionally suicidal and frequently tearful manchild with a floundering career and the prospect of redundancy always lurking. And I wanted to write about my own shortcomings and failures.
I had to do it as Anton rather than me, so started the Farewell Prozac blog to detail my ultimately unsuccessful attempts to come off antidepressants and cope with mental health problems. Perhaps it was the trying, and the failing, which was the important thing, and what I learned from it, all neatly documented in the blog as a kind of talking therapy. Whereas Steve would hide in the toilets at work and cry, and attempt to keep all those feelings to himself, Anton could talk about it, to those random kind strangers who might happen to come across the blog, and see what he'd written. Where I was weak, Anton was strong. I don't think I need to hide behind Anton's name any more, much as it has served me well, and I think it says something positive about the way we see blogging nowadays that it's less shameful to "come out" as a blogger. There are, of course, still a lot of very good reasons why bloggers do wish to remain anonymous, most of them not to do with cowardice; their blogs are just as important as those with grinning photo bylines, perhaps more so in a lot of cases. For me, though, it's been a big relief to be able to say who I am, and to be myself after hiding away for so long.
The Guardian
