Or alternate title: Why do folks accept the identity of accounts only in a negative context?

I'm involuntarily anonymous.

I made the mistake of using my teenage pormanteau of my first and last name on the email for a vBulletin as a teenager. (Or maybe I'm a persistent troll harassing a well known censorship circumvention researcher... narrators can be unreliable, after all.)

I met some of those folks at my second Defcon and... they were just... so terrible. So terrible I never went back to the forum, because I was a kid, angry at authority figures who abused their access and projecting things on to whole races and relgions when the issue was specific people.

It was a very dark moment -- my first Defcon, I wasn't sure if I was going to graduate from college, on probation for knifecrime awaiting expungement, and my second... and only allowed to attend because they were trying to nudge me to join the NSA or CIA.

<borat voice> Love to sit next to an empty placard for Hans Reiser and be told what shrews the wives of the linux devs are... NOT </borat voice>

I tried do the newbie event but someone physically slammed me down and yelled "YOU WERE HERE LAST YEAR".

So I started joking... my legal name is Gregory... my hacker name is Greg.

Anyways -- why is it when I make a nym for 1-4 years and do nothing but be kind, no one goes "hey, you're smart and kind and I know who you are" but... if I spin up a nym for activism, people sniff it out like bloodhounds and "notice" the most minor thing like they're the TA from Real Genius?

Most of my issues stem from lack of money -- I find myself slipping into depression or anxiety when I eat poorly, when I over caffinate, when I don't get exercise -- but... part of that is because I never had an intership with a kitchen, never had the salary to get a maid, to go to spin class and a takeout salad, and unlike say, Tokyo there simply are no healthy options at a price level of the "menu" in the French sense that they had when I'd crash VMware's cafeteria every day with my coworkers from... a research center in Palo Alto.

(I respected the space. I ate my food, talked about work, in one case watched some football, and left, not wandered the grounds jamming my... things... into... openings.)

It feels like a no win situation -- in order to find work, I will have to demonstrate my skills, but I'm forever beholden to people like the woman who abused one of my old coworkers -- she gave him an internship then said she wouldn't give him a good recommendation to anyone else.

And apologies in advance, for the times in the past I've violated guidelines here or other communities -- I created this handle surrounded by enemies, thinking I'd use it over on Twitter for a weekend in Vegas, and things rapidly escalated in ways too numerous to explain here, but I don't know what to do when folks seem to not grok: there is a very different culture in Appalachia than California -- we're simple, not stupid, with long memories and a rich history that you disrespect when you forever treat someone as some sort of... user experience... to... research.

TL;DR: How did you maintain your handles over the years? Am I just terrible at opsec, or was there some social factor I'm missing aside from not using IRC? (Plaintext sucks)