Rebranding: Just Me

Evolving is good, is necessary.

When I envisioned Earth To Self, I was killing myself trying to find a name for a blog I wanted to start because all my friends would read my writing and say, "you're a good writer, you should start a blog!" Having zero idea what I was doing or what to write about, I picked a phrase that felt like the philosophy for my life, and went from there. And then, since I couldn't figure out a career, and was super intrigued by the mysteries and connections of the body and the earth and ancient wisdom, I decided to pursue wellness. I read books, I took a certified health coaching educational program, I started to make posts and talk about some of the things I cared about.

I was living in a small apartment on the fifth floor with my boyfriend, who I had just moved in with and was eager to show off my cooking skills. It was the first time I didn't have to share a kitchen with multiple roommates, so becoming a master of the kitchen was the number one goal. I also had visions of buying a farm one day and living sustainably and homesteading and selling home crafted goods and coaching people to live a balanced healthy life and leading retreats, etc.

I still like those ideas. But...it turns out, that's really only a fragment of who I am and what dreams I hold. And that kind of missed the point of living holistically. I know "holistic" is recently associated to new-age alt-health semi-conspiratorial content (partly why I stepped back from the wellness realm), but the definition of holism is "the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts." Medicinally, it refers to treating a person as a whole instead of just a symptom, and I still stand by that lens of healing. But to me, holism as an approach to life is about multiplicity and understanding how everything is connected and related to each other. Everything.

What I mean is, only presenting certain parts of myself and my dreams for the sake of a "brand" felt like I was cutting off an arm to fit myself into a box. If I live holistically, that means every part of myself gets to surface, because it is essentially only one thread in an entire tapestry.

Beside, I'm far too curious of a person to only stick to one lane. And while having one thing would be helpful, I realize that the only consistent thing I have right now is...me. My whole self. With all my interests and ideas and facets.

So here I am, two-ish years after starting Earth To Self, to say that this catchphrase is going on the back burner for a while. For now, you get me. All my thoughts. All my interests. All my capricious moods. Because all of that is me.

I can be reverent about taking care of the body and reverent about a well-crafted cocktail in the same breath. I can long for the quiet spaciousness of rural countryside at the same time I enjoy crowded urban bars.

Embracing this multiplicity, this wholeness, is giving me a confidence I've never felt. And under everything, my fundamental belief still holds true: that if you value and care for your most essential self, you'll be able to value and care for everything and everyone in the world around you.

For the first time, I have no visions and no direction. No goals. Only an active mind and a love of the pen that is sitting me down here, wanting to share, eager to have conversations about everything under the sun.

So if this gets to be my way of connecting with more people, great. If this is how I get to understand the interconnected intricacies of the world better, wonderful. But there is something more honest in this version of myself and my writing, something more bold and more harmonious, even something more vulnerable.

Writing and reading are ways of interacting, so this is my way of interacting with knowledge, with language, with friends, with strangers, with myself. Here's to a new year and blazing a path through the wilderness. And to evolving into whatever the next version of myself and this site is.

#writing #editing #writer #editor #holism #rebranding #blogger