J’aime la vie.

This time of year feels very cozy and homey to me. Cocoon season; hibernation season; nesting time... all feelings of planning and getting ready to emerge in the spring. What kind of newness are you ready to bring through? How are you preparing to be more YOU?

One thing that is always on my mind is how excited I am for the future that I am creating. The past year has been vast in my personal growth, but quick in my reflection of it. The preparation time has been my whole life prior, and now I believe the real trek has ensued, as I am teaching myself how to create my dreams. I'm learning to embrace my restlessness and scattered mind, and hone in on all the places my heart has been trying to take me.

So this particular chapter of my life feels incredibly potent, as though I have died and been reborn dozens of times in recent years. I realize that I am always going to be changing into new versions of myself. The newest phase is my process of reidentification. I am changing the pronunciation of my name to its proper sound: J'aime = jem, but with a French “J”.

This change is something I have thought about since I was little, but put off because I never thought I had the authority to tell people what to call me. For some reason as a kid, I believed that you don't get to create your own nicknames, so I didn't make it one, and nobody ever called me J'aime (until my French class in high school). I also didn't think I could change it because it's hard to say for Americans, and I grew up not wanting to make people uncomfortable. But times have changed, and it is not my job to give everyone the easy way out, or to give them convenience so they don't have to do anything hard. Part of my mission here on Earth is to teach people that many things in life will be difficult, but that is a good thing, because then you can find what is truly rewarding. I believe you should be living the life of your fucking dreams, and this often means fighting for what you believe in, putting in the hard work, and not letting anyone hold you back. We are born free and we deserve to live free, so we need to start acting like it!

I had convinced myself a long time ago that I needed to accept my name for how it was, because it was just easier that way, and it became so familiar that the decision to separate myself from it has had its own resistances and bouts of grief. I was given the name Jaime after a unique and powerful woman, but my parents spelled it “J'aime,” which is a French word that translates to “I love”.

I accept this name as a gift of empowerment, and I am fascinated to have connected this with how I've always had an incredibly open heart. Finding silver linings is a specialty of mine, and I often try to justify why people behave the way they do through my immense curiosity, rather than simply assuming they are just dumb or an asshole. And I feel so strongly for all living beings, meaning that when I see any suffering, it causes a physically painful reaction within my body. I tend to have overwhelming compassion for wildlife, likely because I have witnessed the decimation of it with my very own eyes through my increasingly-developed Suburban upbringing. But humans harming other humans has never made sense to me, and any thought of war, famine and genocide always pains my actual heart. So by switching to the proper pronunciation of my name, I am setting a standard for myself to embody and express all the love I have for life itself in every moment that I breathe and move.

For forever, I have had an aversion to the name Jaime for myself. I still don't know what it is; it just never felt like 'me'! Perhaps all of that came about because my parents decided to spell my name uniquely, and I can't help but complicate things further. There was always a caveat to my being... “I'm Jaime but with an apostrophe! Nobody spells it like I do!” Otherwise, I would ignore the differentiation, and that has led to most people not ever learning to spell my name right. This tendency for stipulations has trickled into every aspect of my life, and I've finally had enough of pretending to have a standard name. I was given the apostrophe, and I want to embrace it rather than continuing on as if it doesn't even exist. I've had to deal with the confusion my whole life, and I finally decided that I do have the authority to make the life that I am living how I want it to be, and therefore I want to embrace the peripheral meaning of my name, and bring it to the forefront. I have a lot of life left, and I realized that I don't want to die regretting a change I was too scared to make, so I am reclaiming my name for how it was divinely scribed.

There is a song that I absolutely love by Imagine Dragons called “Whatever It Takes,” and he sings, “I'm an apostrophe... just a symbol to remind you that there's more to see...” and that is the grand summation of what I feel my mission is within this existence. To show people that there is so much more to this life than what we've been led to believe; than what we've been sold. Not that changing the pronunciation of my name will be what helps people to open their eyes and look around them and finally realize the deception and suffering that doesn't need to be happening around us. But if I want to remain true to my personal values, and dismantle anything within me that I feel is out of alignment, then I must be able to claim my name for how I believe it should be.

Fundamentally, what is the importance of one's name? I honestly do not know how much it really matters in the overall picture. But I do believe that words (and grammar) do matter in our society, and it frightens me to witness the altering of language in recent years. For example, growing up, I was constantly reminded, “...words can never hurt me!”, yet today, some people are convinced that vocabulary can be considered violence. I guess I believe that we should be listening to words that are empowering to us, and dismiss any that aren't. So each individual will need to consider the weight of their own name for themselves, if it ever occurs to them. My partner seems to think that your name is mostly insignificant, as I am sure many other people would have to agree. Your life will not be judged by how people refer to you, but rather by how you made them feel, or other impacts you provided. However, I have found several people whom I admire online who have gone about changing their names, and the more that I look, the more I find it in personal interactions as well. So I'm certainly not the first adult who has realized that their given name has gotten lost along the way of who they have become. Luckily, for me, it is just the pronunciation that I am changing, so no legal action needs to be taken. I still say changing in the present tense because, as of this writing, this is a challenging process, for myself in telling everyone, but especially for the people who already know me, and I want to be gracious with my loved ones as we all adjust.

I am sharing the depths of this transition with you as an invitation to hold me accountable to my own words. Ultimately, the most important thing I wish to do during my existence here is to spread love and vitality. Anything that opposes those, I want to stand up and speak out against. I do not believe that violence is helpful, yet I desire to lovingly fight the evil and wrongdoing that I witness, and I believe that being regarded as J’aime (“I Love,” and therefore “I am love”) will help to remind me of what I am seeking on this planet that we all share.

How are you preparing to open yourself up to the magic that this blessed world beholds for you?