Words I Write

I’ve had the same name my whole life. I’ve thought about changing it, I’m sure most everyone has, at one point or another. And I’ve been called a lot of things over the years. Some good, others not so much. Other names, pet names that made me uncomfortable. I’m really not a pet name person, not a “Babe” or “Sweetheart” kind of girl. The only pet name I really tolerate is my dad calling me “Sunshine” and he’s been doing that since before I could speak anyway. I was a happy, cheerful baby, always up at sunrise to greet my parents with a grin. (I no longer feel this way about mornings.)

There have been some embarrassing screen names that we won’t talk about but I mostly hate the shortened versions of my name. Nicknames for Elizabeth are mostly mom-ish to me. Liz, Beth, the biggest culprit-Betsy. Ugh, no thanks. It’s just Elizabeth. I’ve even been called a lot of names that aren’t mine when people got my name wrong or forgot it or whatever. Bethany, Elaine, Elliot, Alyssa, Ella, Emily (this one is popular), Eleanor, Eliza; even the one professor who thought my first name was actually Blake. I’ve had to listen for the wrong name an embarrassing number of times when the person taking my order misheard me and I didn’t have the heart to correct them.

I’ve occasionally wished for a shorter name, especially when I was little and E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H was a lot of letters. I’ve wished for a sweet name, the kind boys wrote songs about. All the girls with songs about them had names like Delilah and Miranda. Eliza is the obvious choice, it even rhymes. And it’s better than most of the other bastardizations of my name. It has a good number of syllables. Eliza was okay. But I kinda love one nickname, not Eliza. In fact, it’s not a name I’ve ever been called except for one friend whose little sister used it by accident.

I’ve never been brave enough to rebrand, even when I changed high schools or after, once I finished high school and came to VCU. I also never really had any close friends, or at least not close enough (or maybe just not the type) to give me a nickname I liked. My family of course insists on calling me by a name I dislike, as families tend to. They do it so much they’ve probably forgotten I hate it. Liz. One of the most annoying permutations of my name. But I guess its better than “Beth-Beth” which was the result of my little brothers’ inability to pronounce Elizabeth when they were younger. Speaking of siblings, I’m actually the only one in my family who would prefer to go by my full given name. Timothy is “Tim” Christopher is “Chris”, Christina is “Tina”. Christina is my older sister and I’ve called her “Tina” for as long as I can remember, although she goes by her full name professionally, which makes sense. Being a sibling, I have of course been called all of their names at some point (thanks, mom) and I’ve been mistaken for my sister many times. We sound very similar and we look obviously related so if someone is drunk/it’s dark/I’m sitting/whatever, it happens. There was even a guy in high school who dated me because he had a crush on her. That was fun.

You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve had to say, “no it’s just Elizabeth, please.” Not that anyone listens. My coworkers call me Liz now too. Maybe that’s why I never told anyone the nickname I liked. If they didn’t even respect me enough to call me by my given name when I asked, what would they do if I asked them to call me something else? Laugh? Not use the name I wanted, they already won’t do that. I’ve had shitty dudes try to ‘find’ a nickname for me. There’s still a frat guy from freshman orientation that insists on calling me “Eli.” And then there’s the guy that tried to make the pun “Beth you can’t guess what my name is. Get it? Bet/Beth? Hurhurhur.” He was a dick about it when I said I didn’t like nicknames.

The worst though wasn’t a guy. It was a girl in seventh grade that probably had self-image issues of her own and chose to pick on me. I was mousy, quiet, unassuming, bespectacled. Easy target. So, the delight that she was, she started calling me “Elizabitch” which was ironic because she was so clearly the bitchy one in that situation. And it just rolls off the tongue so nicely, of course, all her little minions started using it too. I hated middle school.

I think that if there had ever been a point in my life where I had a choice I might have used the power, really, to define my own identity. I might have had the agency to say,
“my friends call me Ellie.”

Everyone knows that a mighty oak tree starts life as a tiny acorn. Every hurricane originates with a single drop of rain. An elegant symphony begins with a single note. Great things—well, all things really—start small.

I get caught up in feeling overwhelmed way too often because I somehow forget the truth of the old Chinese proverb: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Seemingly insurmountable obstacles in my life are less defeating when I focus on climbing my mountains one rock at a time. I’m searching for life changing inspiration but maybe I just need day changing inspiration. After all, self improvement is just being unhappy enough to do something about it today. I can do that.

But let’s be honest, not all beginnings feel good. Starting a workout routine is usually accompanied by fatigue, soreness, and plenty of sweat. Moving is frustrating and time consuming and some days it feels like you worked for hours and hours but accomplished nothing. Starting something new is daunting and sometimes risky, whether its a new job, semester, school, or life stage. There are usually false starts, and the desire to backtrack to the way things were seems tempting; but change is usually for the best, even when it’s painful and scary. Failure when you do new things is inevitable and can be discouraging, but it’s only permanent if you let it be. Rejection is the end of a dream but it’s also a beginning for new things. So you didn’t make the yes pile, didn’t get the lead role, maybe you bombed an interview, or flubbed up a date. Now you can pursue something else you wouldn’t even have considered, had your path been easy and free of obstacles.

Whatever happens, keep planting acorns, taking journeys one step at a time and maybe one day you’ll find yourself in the shade of a huge and beautiful oak tree, somewhere wonderful, completely unexpected, and worth the wait. And the best part? It’ll be just the beginning of the next adventure. So start something new. Maybe that thing you’ve always wanted to try…

Rejection blows.
That isn’t really a newsflash, but I’m reminded afresh every time I experience rejection just how bitter of a pill it truly is.

Last week I had a job I loved tell me “it’s not me, it’s you.”
Failure isn’t something I face often, and I’ll admit, the rejection stung. Since then, I’ve seesawed between frustration over completely fixable errors on my part and sadness over the loss of a job I genuinely enjoyed. That kind of out-of-the-blue breakup makes you question a lot about your perception of self; especially if you were bebopping along under the impression that things were going great. It’s rough because it’s so unexpected. It’s hard to react because you’re so unprepared. Like a terrible car accident where you get T-boned, there isn’t much you could have done differently in the moment. You still wonder though, you can’t help it. But really all that’s left is picking up the pieces and trying to move on.

There is a silver lining though: the end of a good thing isn’t the end of the world. Yeah, starting over sucks but I know that this experience doesn’t mean that I’ll never get another job, or that I won’t love a job ever again; it meant that it wasn’t a good fit so now I can go find a better one. And I can choose to learn from my mistakes instead of repeating them. I can email my old boss asking for constructive criticism and whether or not she responds, I’ll know I did the mature thing and behaved professionally. It’s less than a week later and already I’m wiser, more aware of my flaws. I’ve grown in my knowledge of things I wanted to know, and gained experience so I can go out and find somewhere better. I already have an interview lined up somewhere new and maybe now I’ll find a place where I actually want to be friends with my coworkers, who knows? But whatever happens, however much that disastrous adventure sucked, I know that pain is part of the process and struggle creates resiliency. My story doesn’t go: “and nothing bad ever happened, so the end.” That sounds like a terrible story. And worst of all, boring. The best adventures have action, development, and usually some heartache. I’ve got to fight to make my way in the world, I know that. And sometimes I won’t win, I know that too. But that’s not the end of the story, it’s just the end of a chapter and the beginning of another.

Let’s talk about chaos.
I’m currently caught up in a tornado of packing and cleaning, navigating a bike through stacks of boxes in an already tight apartment, counting down the days until I move into my beautiful skylit loft and out of my current crooked and cramped one bedroom. My life is complete chaos at the moment. Between juggling sublease drama with my current place and working five days a week right up until move in, my free time to do anything besides packing is pretty much imaginary. I’m in a constant state of wondering what it is that I’m forgetting, and jolting upright in bed to jot things down on the neverending to-do list before they slip away again. But yet, permeating my mind fog of mild panic is a sense of excitement. Excitement about the future and all the possibilities of living in a cool new place, the potential of the space, the thrill of finding a new job, exploring a new neighborhood, making friends with the neighbors, all of it.  Yes things are crazy, but I do alright with crazy. Chaos is my comfort zone. Growing up in a house with six people plus pets taught me how to work well in a whirlwind. Background noise placates my ADHD and actually helps me focus on tasks (she types, while listening to music).

To me, few things are more beautiful than chaos. Wonderfully breathtaking art is full of chaos just begging you to examine it in detail. Symmetry and simplicity are all well and good, but chaos is stunning and fascinating. It tempts you to lean in a little closer to take a better look. Even as a young child, I would always get sucked into the elaborate worlds created on the pages of  “I Spy” and “Where’s Waldo?” books. I found the strange and bizarre things to look at on every page infinitely fascinating, and would spend hours with a single book, long after I’d found the things viewers are tasked to search for. I just wanted to see it all and soak it in.

Not much has changed since those days of literary hide and seek; I thoroughly enjoy people watching (the key to doing so without being creepy is to wear sunglasses). Intricately detailed patterns appeal to me. I crave hubbub and bustle so much that I seek out busy coffee shops to go and sit in, not even always to work, but just to be stimulated by the environment. That’s really the draw of chaos for me: a multitude of stimulation. The foil to stimulation is boredom. I despise boredom, it zaps energy and motivation, it kills creativity, and it encourages time wasting. How often do we pull out our phones out of boredom in order to kill time and end up wasting it instead of engaging in our environment? I’ll admit I am as guilty of this as anyone else; my phone is my social crutch, my shield to deflect unwanted interactions (less guys hit on you when you’re glued to your phone screen), and a buffer to protect me from discomfort in unfamiliar situations and environments. One of the reasons I like chaos is that it doesn’t leave time for a constant inner monologue about “why did I say it like that?” and “did I make enough eye contact?” or “am I laughing/talking/chewing too loud?” Chaos is Jumping In! feet first with all your clothes on. When your priority is to stay afloat, little things like awkward phrasing pale in comparison to the big stuff such as paying the bills, and ohmygosh there’s so much to do because all the finals are due on the same day.

But chaos is greater than mid-finals panic mode, or hours of material for observation; nature itself is chaos. The tendency of the natural world is entropy, a “gradual decline into disorder.” In layman’s terms, ‘everything naturally goes to shit’. Order becomes chaos and out of chaos comes beauty. It’s a repeating pattern as strange and mysterious as the theory of chaos itself. Chaos theory is the idea that all variables have an impact on a system and is sometimes called the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is just a well known example that explains the idea; the theoretical butterfly, a small and seemingly inconsequential variable, can have a huge impact by creating a ripple of chain reactions leading to a change in weather patterns that creates a hurricane thousands of miles away. Chaos is also mindbending and bafflingly beautiful; just look at fractals, a classic example of chaotic beauty even though they are actually ordered repeating patterns. Fractals are infinitely repeating at any scale, and the wild part is that they exist in nature! Just think about coral reefs or the roots of a tree, regardless of if you zoom in or out, the same pattern of growth appears at differing scales. Nature is chaos and order and chaotic patterns and ordered nonsense. It is awe inspiring and always interesting, and life would not exist without it.

I’m good at a lot of things. I write, I act, I draw, I sculpt, I even code on occasion. But it’s been a very long time since I was the best at anything. I’m smart, not the smartest; I’m funny, but not the funniest; pretty but never the prettiest. I even convinced myself for a while that I was content. I told myself  I didn’t need the limelight. I’ve come in top three a lot. Third place is good. I’m okay with good. Good is good enough. Except…it isn’t. Good is easily underappreciated. Good is the “dependable” girl who always gets overlooked for a promotion. Good is solidly unremarkable, but not terrible. Good isn’t a good thing.

I want big things and I can’t get them just aiming for ‘better than mediocre.’ I want greatness. I want to feel like I can conquer the universe when I finish work. I tamp down my competitive nature most of the time, I’m the chill kind of passive that pretends not to care in order to avoid confrontation; but I crave victory. I want to win and know I earned it, I want to know I deserve the first prize.

But I’m not dumb. I know that greatness is earned through work: hard work, sweat and tears work. Nothing comes easy to me, so why would success be different? There’s even quote about the subject that strikes home, courtesy of Thomas Edison: “opportunity is often missed because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.” If I want things I have to chase them and beat them and earn them. It’s time to stop coasting and start sweating.

Apartment hunting turned out to be a strangely perfect testing ground for this new mindset. If I wanted my dream loft with a skylight and spiral staircase I had to go out and get it! In my case that meant getting into the place as often as possible, emailing the leasing agent at least half a dozen times, calling both her office and her cell when she ghosted a meeting, and even going so far as to invade the showing scheduled after mine to lay down a deposit (basically stealing the place out from under another interested party). I never do this. But aggressively going after what I wanted made me feel so alive. I was unstoppable. I got something I desperately wanted because I actively pursued it. Desperate desire isn’t truly desperate until you’re willing to make a fool of yourself in front of complete strangers. Mission accomplished. Next on the agenda, get the best internship in the world. And maybe have a slice of my cake.