<p>whoami. The most existiental of all the UNIX commands, and yet the most pointless. I can just look to the left of where my cursor is blinking, and there you have it- username@hostname, plain as day.</p>
<p>So whoami? I write my documents in /home/vanevander/, yet whoami says root. I tell GNURoot Debian my name, and yet it still addresses me as "root".</p>
<p>Much like real life, I suppose. I once tried giving people my preferred name, thought I'd start testing a potential post-transition future. (I identified as nonbinary.) And they shrugged it off and rolled their eyes and called me weird and kept calling me by my birth name.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Fi, the terminal says. Another night of disassociating into whatever video game I played last, the room spinning so fast that I press my arms into the mattress and close my eyes and pray to deities I know in the back of my mind are nonexistent that the planet won't reject me and eject me into orbit to choke and die alone amid the trash of humanity.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Luci, whatever chat application I'm using with Matrix at the time says. Unless it's one I frequently use Bitmask on, in which case it says Serlis. But Luci- a fragment of a time I thought I knew what the hell was going on with my gender identity. A fragment of a time where I was closest to the Patron-Saint of Productivity, where I almost had a true role model I wasn't just sucking up to.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Medusa, my computer says. The one who never sleeps, the one whose desire has faded into the night, now only longing to turn away from the world and self-seclude in a voluntary secular monastery of her own creation. Waiting for the object of her death with open arms and a throat ready to giggle at the drop of a single ragged feather.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Cloud, my phone says. The primordial god of chaos. An echo of the last night I spent in a hotel, the last night before I moved into my current house. So many hours wasted chasing after so many codes that would never work, only to be done in in a second in a bleary night in April a few months later.</p>
<p>But I've been forgetting the most important question of all.</p>
