Depending on how you ended up here, you may be asking yourself some or all these questions:

1. Why is the author of this newsletter named “Yan Basque”?
2. Why is the copyright holder of this newsletter named “Yan Thériault”?
3. Are these two identities the same person?

I have been living a double life my entire adult life. Now in my mid-40s, I think I’ve reached the point where I want to merge these two identities.

Nom de plume

From an early age, I understood that part of being an artist meant forging a new identity for myself. When I was 14 or 15, I adopted the mononym “Yanth” (often stylized as “YANTH”) and insisted everyone call me by that name, including my family, friends and teachers. It was deliberately pretentious and confusing to pronounce. I was a weird teenager testing my ability to control how others perceive me.

Later, as I thought a bit more seriously about putting my work out there for the public to find, I opted to use my mother’s maiden name, Basque, for a few reasons: it sounds better, is easier to pronounce in English, and is less common in francophone Canada than Thériault. (I was also worried that if I ever published a novel, I would get confused with Yves Thériault.)

But with the advent of social media, what had started as an aesthetic decision morphed into a strategy for keeping my professional and personal lives separate. I didn’t necessarily want potential or current employers reading my blogs, scrolling through my social media accounts, or listening to the music I was putting online. It worked. For years I kept these two sides of myself separate, with only my closest friends and family aware of my double identity.

My schizophrenic self

A few years ago, a new buzz phrase started circulating at the office, the idea that you should “bring your whole self to work.” My boss at the time spoke enthusiastically about this concept and it came up in a few HR workshops. It was loosely connected to the idea that diversity in the workplace is a good thing - not just for the marginalized folks who deserve jobs as much as everyone else, but because diversity of skills and perspectives is good for business. You probably have acquired skills and knowledge outside of your job that make you more “valuable” as an employee. Why not embrace it?

In practice, this idea does not work. No one brings their whole self to work. We compartmentalize. We choose carefully which parts of ourselves we are willing to expose to our coworkers and which areas of our lives we let them in. This is doubly true for those of us who are queer or otherwise marginalized. It’s not like I was closeted at work or as if no one knew I was in a punk band or whatever. Above all, it was my politics more than my sex life that I thought could lead to disastrous consequences. The corporate social media accounts would celebrate pride month, but they would never say “Defund the police” or “Free Palestine.” So I censored myself and had a strict no coworker policy on my social media accounts. My pseudonym helped maintain those boundaries.

Reclaiming my whole self

In the past few months, as I’ve been actively applying to jobs and contemplating the career I want for myself, I spent a lot of time thinking about the things I’ve accomplished in my life. Things I am proud of and want to take credit for. Things I should be able to brag about in cover letters and job interviews. The reality is that most of those things have been put out into the world under the name Yan Basque, which is not the name on my résumé or on my LinkedIn profile.

Yan Basque co-founded the Lab Synthèse collective, which launched the careers of various Montreal-based musicians and artists, including Grimes. He was in charge of booking the events calendar at Le Cagibi and curated La Nuit Blanche. He organized and promoted shows under the banner of Against Language Productions. He performed, recorded and released music as Racine and as The Great Vowel Shift. He was a member of the bands Denial Tone/Drunk Dial, The Central Shaft, Sacral Nerves and Home Alone. He wrote and self-published three zines: Empty Bottles Carrying Talking Teeth (with artist Nicole Aline Legault), Possible Worlds and Shadows at the Mall. He published the blog Irrelevant Comics. He contributed to various projects by other artists and musicians, like Four Minutes to Midnight, Pod The Musical and King of Pop. He wrote and illustrated a graphic memoir called What Am I? And now he publishes this weekly newsletter A Series of Doubts.

I did all that and more. Me, Yan Basque (whose legal name happens to be Yan Thériault). And I’m proud of it all.

I don’t know exactly what this means for my career or how it will help me find a job. But I know it’s more interesting and more meaningful than most of what is on my current CV. And while I still dislike the phrase “bring your whole self to work,” I hope that whatever’s next for me allows me to celebrate and be proud of those accomplishments.

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This week’s recommendations

• Since we’re talking about my accomplishments, check out my graphic memoir, What Am I?
• It’s been two weeks since the US election. This article by Gabriel Winant at Dissent is the best and clearest analysis of what went wrong that I’ve read: Exit Right.
• And finally, since Bluesky is getting a spike of engagement lately, I’m going to recommend that you follow me there.