Password Purgatory

I want to say upfront: I have never once forgotten a phone number, a birthday, or the exact moment a friend wronged me in 2013. But ask me for my email password and I will stare at you like you just asked me to recite the periodic table backwards on a unicycle. This is the specific flavor of hell known as password purgatory, and I live there now. I pay rent. I’ve decorated.

Every site wants something different. One wants a capital letter. One wants a symbol. One wants a number that isn’t sequential, isn’t a birthday, and apparently isn’t emotionally significant, because God forbid your password mean something to you. Somewhere out there is a website that will reject ‘Fluffy1987!’ for being ‘too personal,’ as if my dead childhood hamster is a security vulnerability.

Welcome to Password Purgatory, Population: Me and a Very Judgmental Login Screen

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: it doesn’t end. You think you’ve escaped when you finally build a password strong enough to make a bank vault blush, and then the site says, ‘Great! Now do it again, but different, in six months.’ It’s not security. It’s a subscription service for anxiety, and the only thing I’ve successfully protected is my own sanity, and even that’s iffy some days.

I once spent eleven minutes crafting a password so elegant, so secure, so structurally sound it could survive a hurricane, and then I forgot it before I finished typing the confirmation box. Eleven minutes of my one wild and precious life, gone, sacrificed to a system that will forget I exist the moment I try to log in from a new device.

The Seven Stages of Password Purgatory Somehow Involve a Squirrel

Stage one: confidence. You type a password you’re sure you’ll remember forever, something clever, something personal, something that feels like it’s actually you. Stage two: betrayal, when the site informs you it needs a symbol. Stage three: rage typing, where you slam in exclamation points like you’re punishing the keyboard for a crime it didn’t commit. Stages four through six are just variations of forgetting, resetting, and forgetting again, in a loop tight enough to count as cardio.

Stage seven is acceptance, where you finally admit defeat and create a password that’s basically a scream in text form. Mine currently reads ‘HelpMe2026!’ which, frankly, doubles as both a login credential and an accurate description of my emotional state at 11pm on a Tuesday. I’m not proud. I am, technically, secure. But I am not proud.

My Therapist Says Password Purgatory Isn’t a Real Diagnosis, Yet

I brought this up in therapy once. I said, ‘I think I have a real problem, I live in password purgatory now,’ and she gave me the same face my dentist gives me when I say I ‘sort of’ floss. She said it’s not clinical. I told her to give it time, the manuals used to not have a word for ‘doomscrolling’ either, and now we’re all fluent.

Here’s my actual theory: password requirements stopped being about security a long time ago and became a personality test. Anyone still using ‘password123’ is an optimist. Anyone using their pet’s name plus a birth year is a romantic. And anyone who’s downloaded a password manager, memorized none of their own logins, and now trusts a small glowing icon with their entire financial identity? That’s not a security strategy, that’s a marriage.

I don’t have a password manager. I have a system. The system is a sticky note that says ‘you know the one’ and a deep, abiding faith that I’ll figure it out eventually, usually after three failed attempts and one very personal email from my own bank asking if I’m okay.

So no, I haven’t solved password purgatory. Nobody has. We’re all just down here together, resetting our passwords into slightly different arrangements of the same four traumas, waving symbols around like we’re casting spells instead of just trying to check our email. If you need me, I’ll be at the bar, drink in hand, muttering ‘8 characters, 1 symbol, 0 hope’ like it’s a prayer. Because at this point, it kind of is.