The Death of ItsLarryG

After a decade of hiding behind a username, I'm finally putting my own name on the work.

I’ve always known my name was special. I was named after my father, Larry George. Unlike many others who were named after their fathers, I am not a junior. Instead, I am Larry George II. I’m not sure why my parents opted for this, but it’s something I’ve worn with pride my entire life.

For me, it gives my name a bit of regality. It’s a little fancy. It puts the sauce and the swagger on my name and gives it a bit of punctuation. And I enjoy telling people my full name because they usually have the same almost impressed reaction.

As a millennial, I remember a time before the internet as we know it today. I remember when people were afraid to use their real names on things. I, like many others, fell victim to this. My first username was “biznesprince”. It's completely ok to laugh or cringe. It’s pretty funny to me now. I developed that name because I was interested in business, and I referred to myself as a prince, cue references to The Fresh Prince, my being the II, and my religious upbringing. 

Once I got to college, I decided to retire that name and adopt a new one. I wanted to use LarryG because I thought that sounded good. It rolled off the tongue. But unfortunately, some other LarryG beat me to it. They also beat me to LarryGeorge, and no, it’s not my father who claimed that name online. I briefly held the domain larrygeorge2, but I didn’t like the way that looked online. Everywhere I went, I was too late to claim the name, so I added some letters and eventually landed on ItsLarryGYo. Again, it’s ok to laugh.

This name stuck for a while as I was in college figuring out who I would become. However, as I neared graduation and was involved in a marketing internship, I decided to drop the “Yo” as “ItsLarryG” was available. This has been my username and moniker since about 2015/2016. It was mine, and people began recognizing it. As I grew professionally and online, it was completely normal for people to refer to me by ItsLarryG or LarryG. My plan was working.

However, things began to get a little shifty as my online personality developed. What began as some fun YouTube personality or occasional blogger transformed into marketing, photography, videography, content creation, and eventually a business known as ItsLarryG Creations. I wanted my business to encompass all of those aforementioned interests. The main issue was that saying ItsLarryG Creations became a task, and telling people my username always required me to spell things out for them.

This wasn’t terrible, and I got used to it, but it still bothered me. Over the years, I toyed with branding my business without an attachment to my name, but I could never land on something that felt like me, so I kept the moniker. Every brand idea I came up with felt like I was creating a horcrux, like I was shaving off a piece of my soul. And honestly, I could never stick to one single thing or niche. I’ve written about this several times before.

So, over the years I’ve tried and failed multiple times to branch off and bring together my competing interests. However, in early 2026 I decided on one clean break: my consumer portrait photography deserved a lane of its own, and so Larry James Photo was born. This felt like the right move, as my other genres of business and creative pursuits could remain under ItsLarryG while families and the like could look at, and actually remember, Larry James Photo.

This all made sense until sometime in March of 2026. I had been full-time freelancing for over a year and had recently returned to traditional work. I decided that it was time for ItsLarryG Creations to be retired. I had morphed and molded that brand into so many different things, and I was honestly tired of the hassle of dealing with it, so I let it go. 

It felt like a weight off my shoulders. That official business was no more. I changed things over to Larry James Photo, and things felt good… for about 2 weeks. You see, just because the official name and business were gone didn’t mean the inquiries, the desire for money, or the passion for the interest went away. 

So I’d take on the occasional project: social media marketing here, a brand photoshoot there, a video editing job here, a podcast recording there. From April to September, I accepted projects and completed them as a freelancer without the LLC name attached. 

I should also mention that part of the reason I retired the ItsLarryG Creations business was that at that time, I simply couldn’t afford to keep it. It takes a certain amount of money to run creative businesses, with the insurance and subscriptions and the like. The reason I stopped full-time freelancing was that I simply couldn’t afford to keep it up with a young child at home.

So, as I began a vigorous job search, some things had to be let go, and once I landed the full-time job, I let the business go with it.

I by no means make enough to consider full-time freelancing again, but the opportunities I’m presented with allow me to buy a few things for my wife and daughter or for us to go out to eat every now and then.

This brings me to today, September 23, 2026. It’s my 33rd birthday, and I’ve been thinking about this since last year. What if I retired ItsLarryG completely? It feels crazy because, as you’ve read, it’s been my moniker for at least a decade. What would I even change it to? Who would I be?

And then it came to me as if out of nowhere… be yourself. Be Larry George II.

It was so simple and yet slightly foreign. But I think one of the things that helped me finally make this decision was reading Will Smith’s book, Will. Spoiler alert, but in the book you learn that Will Smith’s name is actually Willard Smith II. Reading Will Smith's full name triggered something embarrassingly simple in me. I'd spent years trying to figure out what to call myself when I'd had the answer the entire time. 

Over the past few weeks, I contemplated how I would do this. Should I make a video? I’ve done that before. Should I just make a social media post? What good would that do? And again, almost as if from a dream or divine intervention, the answer was clear: own your space.

Owning my space meant building the digital foundation for what I’ve been becoming.

My entire life I wanted to be a writer. That shifted when I made money selling custom CDs outside my mom’s beauty salon to her customers and again when I changed my major from journalism to business and eventually marketing. It shifted again when I discovered my love of making videos and eventually photography. And while the pursuit shifted, the thing that never did was the aspect of writing.

I went from writing fiction to telling real stories to fabricating stories to sell real products and services. The final medium or output changes, but the base remains the same. Every successful project I’ve done starts with writing the story. For every difficult problem I’ve faced, there’s a page in a journal or document on some server that holds my thoughts. 

I never needed someone’s permission to be who I am, a writer and visual storyteller. But something inside me or outside in the world told me that I needed external validation to claim what was already mine. I needed the eyes, the bylines, the recognition, or I needed to stick to a lane and fit in a box.

These are lies, and I believe they are what has been holding me back from breaking through the proverbial ceiling. My multipassionate efforts have begun to merge, and I can feel some sort of breakthrough approaching. When I do finally break through, I don’t want to do it as anything or anyone other than my true self, Larry George II.

And so with that, ItsLarryG needs to die. He taught me so much. I will carry those lessons with me into this next chapter.

Goodbye, old friend. I’ll keep your memory alive with what has become my mantra: 

Do the work. 

Believe in yourself. 

Keep Creating.

Larry George II

September 23, 2026