<a id="literary-initials"></a>Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
-(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J." or "J.T.", which feel like a name on account of having a _J_ in it); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
+(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J." or "J.T.", which [feel like a name on account of having a _J_ in them](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions)); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)