When I came up with the title of my first blog, Her Silent Musings, Audrey Niffenegger’s book, Her Fearful Symmetry, had just come out. I was mesmerized by the title, even though to this day, I have yet to read the book. The words held a sturdy rhythm that I liked when reading the title aloud to myself. There was something in those syllables that felt rotund and comfortable. I wanted the title of my blog to sound like that. I wanted it to carry the weight of intrigue and mystery while symbolizing who I am and what I do, which is think…a lot – daydreams, brainstorms, past occurrences, words, music, prayer. Sometimes I overthink. It’s what I do.
So, when I switched over to WordPress from Blogger, I’d gone through two names aside from HSM. I wanted a fresh start – something new where people could “relearn” me, in a sense. Lauren Ever After came to me, because I wanted to settle down with myself and be okay with who I am. Which is all well and good, but then after a while I started thinking, “Now what? I’ve accepted myself for who I am. What else is there to say?” Someone else might have been able to find a lot to say on the subject of learning to love themselves, but for me it was merely this decision I’d come to and there was nothing left to think on. I am who I am.
Then the idea of “renovating” my blog came to me, and I realized that, moreso than renovating the actual layout and design of the blog, I wanted to renovate the idea behind it. What does it mean to me to write here? What am I trying to accomplish by it? More than learning to accept myself and be happy with who I am, I realized I wanted to write about how I see things and other people, not just how I see myself, and the words of Her Silent Musings came back to me and started feeling more in sync with what I want to do with this blog. As I was describing to a friend the other day, it feels as though what my subconscious was trying to push me towards several years ago has finally caught up with my conscious mind. Or, more correctly, that my conscious mind has caught up with my subconscious.
The name Her Silent Musings carries a kind of intangible heart in its letters and form. For me, it’s a kind of home that I hear of and imagine what it looks like, as though I’ve been there before. And I have been, even if it wasn’t in a physical way. It was something I’d once created and built, and I miss walking through its staircases and finding its hidden passageways. Lauren Ever After has started feeling too centrally focused on myself – something I don’t want. Right now, this place feels too internal, and I’m itching to reach out to the external realms of what I could be doing with my writing. I have no idea if this makes any sense to you, and I’m sorry if it doesn’t. But it makes perfect sense to me, and if I have to rough up a patch of dirt by stopping in my tracks to veer down the trail I’d been looking for all along, then so be it.
It’s interesting how circular writing is. I started with Her Silent Musings: The beauty in misguidance is acquiring the ability to pave your own path, and having gone away from it, walked circles around it, and stopped at a completely random place only to look up and find myself back where I started, but more mentally matured, I feel a little bit more whole. One of my favorite professors once described that as the way an essay should be written, and without even knowing I was doing it, it has also been the way I’ve interpreted life since that lesson. We always seem to come back to the things that matter most to us, but more weathered, wiser, and readier than before.