I am Everything You Think I am

On the Alias as Form, Fracture, and Rap Fiction's Realest Trick

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) by Kerry James Marshall

The night I almost drowned, I took a small hammer to a photo of myself.
Seven cracks bloomed across the glass.
In each: a different alias, staring back.

A windstorm peeled charcoal shingles from Detroit duplexes.
Rain drowned the city’s ancient sewers.
Refuse from another century swirled above the grates.

The truth held steady.
I split open.

Seventeen years of confusion and false pursuits laced my sneakers tight.
We could afford them. But my mom never bought us Jordans.

Each defiant and distinct alias stepped forward and named their purpose.

This time, they declared, depression would not be our response. This time, we wouldn’t meet the attack with collapse or self-pity. This time, I’d trace the wound to its root and unmake the delay it had caused.

---

The books had always been teaching.

I read Operation Shylock: A Confession in the grad school days of my literary tradecraft. Back then, my toolbox was lighter than the others in the workshop, so I apprenticed myself to the canon, trying to build my way in. I picked up books as tools I hadn’t yet earned the right to wield. Roth? I devoured ten of his in just a few years, searching for the craft behind the man with all the masks.

Operation Shylock was the map Roth drew to track his own ghost. In it, a man named Philip Roth travels to Israel to confront an impostor—also named Philip Roth—preaching Diasporism: a radical call for Jews to abandon Israel and return to post-Holocaust Europe.

One of Roth’s densest novels, it’s a hall of mirrors—identity and insanity, performance and paranoia, all endlessly reflected. The book insists its madness must be real. Less like fiction, more like the fever dream of a manic God scrolling through seven televisions at once.

And then he tried to convince an interviewer the novel was really prose reality tv.

In 1993, Barbara Shulgasser-Parker interviewed Roth about the book. He insisted it wasn’t fiction. There was no “character” based on Henry Kissinger—only the man himself.

Stunned, she tried to clarify that Roth had merely used Kissinger’s name in a fictional context.

Roth cut her off again:

“You keep calling him a character. It’s Henry Kissinger.”

When she pointed to the publisher’s copy calling Shylock a novel, Roth waved it off:

“I didn’t write that. I had nothing to do with that.”

This is all from her 2022 essay Writer on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: The Time Philip Roth Lied to Me, where she also discovers he made the same claim to another reporter, Esther B. Fein of The New York Times. In Fein’s March 9, 1993 article, Roth says:

“As you know, at the end of the book a Mossad operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction… So, I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do.”

That “Note to the Reader” begins, This book is a work of fiction, and ends, This confession is false.

I tell you this because I face the same dilemma. The story I’m writing—the story you're already in—carries the same fracture. The truths sound impossible. The purple haze moves like metaphor. The outlandishness makes YouTube alien theorists seem restrained.

I named the story Everything But the Fiction for a reason.

Sadly, you’ll never believe me, but it’s all true.

---

Rap gave my learning rhythm.

The first Jay-Z lines to truly captivate me came from In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. I was a teenager at boarding school, walking the tree-lined path to the student center, mouthing the words: “For the millionth time, asking me questions / like Wendy Williams, harassing me / Then get upset when I catch feelings / Can I get a minute to breathe?” I didn’t yet grasp the technical brilliance or the internal rhymes.

What I understood and needed was the coolness. The indifference to being misunderstood. The act of building a confident exterior between yourself and a world determined to doubt you. Hov taught me that.

Jay-Z’s aliases were not just a progression in branding. They were a survival strategy. Jigga was the hustler, the avatar of street intelligence and quick reflexes. Jay-Z became the businessman, the self-aware operator navigating industry and image. Hov was the culmination, an elevated version of the ego, who could convert contradiction into legacy.

These were not theatrical masks. They were containers for different forms of emotional weather. Together, they made him readable without making him fully knowable.

Some might say this layered identity came from trauma, but the way he transformed it into myth is what secured his legacy. The drug dealer wasn’t erased. He was reframed. Not to shed stigma, but to seize control.

Jay-Z did not escape his past. He reincarnated it. In doing so, he created a language of self-resurrection, a kind of literary physics embedded in beats and bars.

If Roth used fiction to split identity, Jay used music to hold it together. In both cases, the alias became the clearest expression of the self.

---

At some point, I started to wonder if all this fracturing wasn’t actually the illness, but the cure. What if being split wasn’t a failure of self, but a method of survival in a world built to break continuity?

That’s when I found R.D. Laing.

Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote The Divided Self in 1960, a book that reads like it had been beamed from the subconscious of many artists I admired.

His argument was simple but devastating: what we call madness might actually be a form of clarity. A rational response to an irrational world. A fragmented identity, he said, wasn’t always pathological. Sometimes it was armor.

Roth’s mirror games, Jay’s name changes, my own aliases, they weren’t evasions. They were tactics. They were tricks for staying intact when everything else tried to tear you apart.

Laing gave me the theory behind the instinct. He helped me understand the alias not as disguise, but as design. Not deception. Strategy. Not falsehood. Force. Every fracture became part of the architecture.

That’s when I stopped trying to glue the glass back together.

I started re-arranging the shards.

---

And the seven cracks began to talk back.

The first reflection staring back from the glass was a cunning, defiant trickster who never settled for easy answers, who knew how to use misdirection and anger as armor. Behind the bravado, the accent, and the hunger for women was a boy begging the world not to humiliate him first.

What he wanted most was a brother who wouldn’t leave, but what he became was a hammer looking for the softest place to hit. His genius was self-mythology; his flaw was thinking myth could save him from grief.

Next to him stood the academic, burdened with footnotes, haunted by canons that hurt worse than gunfire. He thought he understood everything, yet felt nothing clearly. Forever caught in the tangle of what he’d just read.

His tragedy wasn’t ignorance but faith: he believed analysis could protect him from consequence, and when it didn’t, he disengaged. Not to escape, but to sulk in the safety of self-made exile.

Then appeared an even more relentless theorist. One who was always framing and reframing, creating structures so intricate they bordered on silence. Heartbreak was his curriculum, love his cult, and the mixtape he made in its aftermath played like a field recording from emotional exile.

He wasn’t afraid to be ridiculous, just terrified he’d be forgettable—and in that terror, he drafted a new kind of fiction: part theory, part comedy, part elegy, part escape.

Next was the one obsessed with order, a pragmatist who believed he could build his way out of any collapse. He managed chaos through property lines, spreadsheets, and sex appeal. His gospel was hustle, his altar was a couch in a condo that he never cleaned.

Beneath the planner lived a dreamer in drag, draped in ambition and delusion. He believed if he just kept building: scripts, companies, relationships, fantasies, something would finally hold. But nothing did. He mistook disarray for destiny, and tried to film his failures into something avant-garde.

There was also the girl, young but already carrying echoes of those who came before. She didn’t just observe the world; she tracked its patterns like an archivist of futures. From an early age, she saw how power dressed itself, how men expected to be excused, how women rewrote the rules in silence.

She wasn’t wise because someone taught her; she was wise because the world kept trying to lie, and she kept objecting to its perjury. She spoke less than she saw, but when she did speak, her truth bent time. Hers was the clarity of someone born to record what hadn’t happened yet.

Following her was the traveler, the one who kept trying to be whole. He believed that understanding could bridge silence. That history could be reasoned with. That travel might soften a father’s contempt. Among the seven, he’s the one most obsessed with trying to be good. Not pure, but righteous, the one with an inherited ache to live cleanly inside a broken world.

Finally, at the far edge of the shattered image, stood my mirror-self—my double. His gaze was accountability, a shared placenta to every secret. He kept the score, echoing every failure and triumph. He was there to ensure I never forgot myself.

Each of these aliases wasn’t separate from me; they were the parts of myself I became to keep from drowning.

They were more real than the singular identity others demanded. They taught me that through survival I could shape every fracture into form until it became an artifact of my existence, one only I could create.

I shattered the glass to see myself clearly.

I hid the shards between pages of scripture, each one a verse I had to live before I could write.