My life seems to be a series of ellipses
Starting in fits,
ending in sputters.
This transformation is taking its time,
it’s been quite a while. 2009.

I wrote those verses at the top five years ago, at a time when I was only starting to develop the idea of what I’d like to be. I have had at least one alter-ego since I was a teenager. It is funny how the first one started as a nickname and evolved to have a life of its own, quite literally. I designed an elaborate virtual identity for my alter-ego and through it, lived vicariously doing things and saying things under the thin veil of anonymity that an alter-ego offers.

I look back now and I’m grateful for my alter-ego. It was all perhaps just teenage angst, not much to it really. Fits and sputters? So dramatic.

People told me there was an element of madness to what I was doing, how I was coping with being two people at a time. I always tried to explain that life was too complex to be gone through with one personality. You have to have phases, each contributing to each, feeding off each other in a symphonc symbiosis.

I remember how I was “Ade Adey” (sort of a demi-James Bond) circa 2005 and used his guts to walk away from a gun pointed at me by cultists at a Lagos university. Or the times when I’d deliberately get lost in foreign cities. Ahmed wouldn’t have done those things, I had to be “in character” and I’m a more complete person because of it. I have a separate alter-ego these days and it serves its purposes extremely well.

I get the usual remarks about my mental health, mostly because I’d do outrageous things (like put garri in my cousin’s cake mix) that don’t quite fit with the introverted intense persona that people who know me are comfortable with. They say I am eccentric, have multiple personality disorder etc. I just shrug and smile at them. They don’t understand how one person can be described as “22 going on 82” as well as “incredibly vibrant and magnetic”.

One of my favourite rappers is Eminem and his alter-egos are phenomenal. Slim Shady is the aggressive, mud-slinging, no-holds barred personality that drove the earliest Eminem records. These days, we’ve seen a balanced personality emerge with Marshal Mathers imposing himself a bit more and displaying the tender side to the rapper. Incidentally, my favourite tracks are more Marshall Mathers than Eminem – Toy Soldiers, Stan, Sing for the moment et al. Beyonce (Sasha FM), Sacha Cohen (Ali G/Borat) all have alter-egos. Justin Bieber (Shawty Mane) and (I love this one) Nicki Minaj (Roman Zolanski) too!

Alter-egos abound in literature; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are perhaps the most famous examples. Comics have given us Superman and Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Spiderman, Bruce Banner and The Hulk etc.

We should all have alter-egos. To some extent, I think we all do have alter egos. It is fun to think of ourselves as alter-egos of people living in a parallel universe, perhaps that’s all that we really are.

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Ahmed Adeyanju works at the intersection of corporate finance, media, development, technology and entertainment. He writes stuff like this in 30 minutes…every year or so.

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30 Days 30 Voices series is an opportunity for young Nigerians to share their stories and experiences with other young Nigerians, within our borders and beyond, to inspire and motivate them.

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.