When my best friend read my first book he called me up crying. He knew it was threaded with my personal stories, that the darkest parts of the story were blood dripped from the pages was birthed from my life. While I use a pen name it's just a slight change from my real name, using my middle name instead of my first.
I get why people use pen names. Marketing, anonymity, protection, they're all good reasons and I respect that. But for me it comes down to a simple thing, I don't write that way. What I write is what I've lived, its who I am, the things I bled for and the ideals I fight for. In life we are butchered by the world into mockeries of who we were meant to be, we spend our lives with misshapen hearts trying to get back to the purity that is our birth right. So caught up in fitting in or making a buck we miss out on being fully, truly, who we are. I just ... can't do that. I won't.
I had a friend say to me once 'business is business'. It's such a common saying that it sickens me. Business is people, it's lives lost, children going hungry, broken souls and homeless mothers. There is nothing that we do that isn't part of the world. What's the difference between a pen name and your real name, only the truth. I'm not calling anyone out, or even saying you're wrong, but for me ... its too high a price to pay. Telling my story as me is the point of it.
Writing has made me happy for the first time in my life. It healed what no one had ever been able to, reaching places that I'd walled off with scar tissue and hate. If I can't be honest about that ... then what am I going to be honest about?