What’s your Name?

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I’m doing the Zero to Hero Challenge. Unfortunately, Day 2’s assignment is to flesh out the title of your blog and your tagline.

Here’s the thing though: until I come up with a definitive direction for this blog, my current, simplistic identity is the only rational choice.

You see, Identity is a pretty big thing for me. I went through a lot during high school and my early adult years, things I might disclose at a later date. Generally though, I often got lost inside my own head and completely removed myself from the world around me. I’ve spent the last three or four years trying to find who I am now and who I want to be in the future.

Many cultures believe naming things gives them power or that telling someone your name relinquishes power to that person. And, ya know, I always thought that was kind of ridiculous. I first learned about it in middle school with Greek Mythology but then you think about Bloody Mary and Beetlejuice, etc. But I grew up in a culture that makes you say not only your name but interesting facts about you on the first day of school, a culture where those who believe in the power of a name would be a constant state of discomfort.

The last few years have taught me just how right those cultures may be though. If someone knows your name, they think they know you and, by extension, think they have a right to know your life even if you don’t want to share it and then they judge you on it.

I’m guilty of it myself. I’ve definitely whipped out the ‘full name chastise’ method on friends and family, to be annoying or just to be cheeky. But let me tell you something really important that I’ve been learning in the last year: people only have as much power as you give them. The name isn’t really the power, the power is only what you make of it.

Introduction

Oh goodness, I’ve succumb to peer pressure and created a big kid blog!

My two beautiful friends Maggie (maggiewholivesathome) and Kristi (ilovegypsylife) recently started their own blogs and have convinced me to hop on the bandwagon. In doing so, Maggie found the Zero to Hero Challenge and now we’re all going to become real boys… wait, I mean bloggers.

The first assignment is to introduce yourself and to introduce your blog. So let’s start with the easy part. I’m Brittany (Brit or B for short), I’m 23 years old, and I just graduated from college. I double majored in English and Public Relations and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing with my life.

As for this blog, my primary motivation is to have something to do with all the free time I suddenly have without school. I have a job (a retail position at a local pharmacy that I’ve had since I was 17) but without classes, I’m going to be spending a lot of time trying to find a real job and watching a lot of Netflix.

Originally, I was thinking of a blog about my insatiable wanderlust and how in love I am with places I’ve never been and cultures I’ve never experienced. Then I realized that should a potential employer ever see that, they’d think I was just trying to run as far away from responsibilities as possible which is simply not the case.

I am passionately and inexplicably in love with the human experience and the beauty of life and the world. I honestly believe there is no such thing as an insignificant person. In a perfect world, I could spend every day of the rest of my life documenting the life stories of strangers, showing the world just how important the littlest part of their life is to the grander scheme of things.

Alas, this is not a perfect world and things like bills and student loans exist. Because of those responsibilities, I have career ambitions that will hopefully allow me to reconcile my love for the world and the people in it with the requirements of a livelihood.

In the end, I guess this blog is my first step in figuring out how to make that happen, how to attach my infinite wanderlust with my pragmatic responsibilities.

Until then, I’m Brittany, and this is my blog.