Last week a young man in my Nonfiction Writing Workshop at Columbia pulled me aside after class.

“Hey, so did you write something that everyone read a while ago?”

“Umm…. maybe. What was it specifically?”

“It was about volunteer travel…something about little white girls.”

“Oh, shit.”

I had made it to the last month of class in my first semester back in college before anyone made a connection between what I do in school, and what I publish online, speak about, and make a living off of.

I had no idea how to react.

There is something wonderfully splendid in the relative anonymity that comes with writing. I can sit across a coffee shop table from someone reading my website and there is a 99.99% chance that they will not make the connection between their screen and the dorky looking girl with her hair up in a bun and smudged eyeliner sipping on a hot chocolate two feet away.

It’s amazing. It grants me the ability to say what I want without a lot of fear. But it’s also ridiculously naive. I speak at schools, do interviews for documentaries, and have a freakin Facebook page. My face is out there, my not-so-common name is glued onto everything I do, and it was only a matter of time until someone said, “Wait, so you’re that girl?”

A few years ago I was on High School Musical star Monique Coleman’s short-lived talk show Gimme Mo. One of the other panelists was a young man named Matt Diaz. Last month a short video he made, revealing his excess skin after losing hundreds of pounds, went viral. He called me soon after and we chatted about the oddity that is the Internet.

But while I can go to class with people who’ve probably read something I’ve written for three months before anyone says anything, he get’s recognized on a daily basis.

My life goes on (mostly) uninterrupted, while he can’t go many places anymore without collecting a posse.

I try to convince myself that no one reads my work, that those who do are far away and will never be in my writing workshop, that I can do documentaries without anyone realizing that the human on the screen is the same human awkwardly shuffling her feet on the way to class.

But then the reader looks up from the screen, looks me in the eyes, and there’s no running away.

I nod, mutual recognition, grab my bag and walk out. Off to find another coffee shop, maybe this time one without wifi.