A Blog By Any Other Name

About six months ago, I started writing a blog post. Now, I am given to putting things on the long finger but coming back to writing this half a year later is pushing it even by my standards.

Regardless, I’m here now, and though I’ve watched a lot of Doctor Who, I have yet to acquire a time machine. Somebody write a strongly-worded letter to the BBC.

The post I started writing last February began as a way to tease out a name for the Leg Up blog and a path forward for the project itself.

It began: “Most of the work I do hinges on the fact that words have meaning.”

And this is true. I write for a living and aim primarily for clarity and understandability though I occasionally allow myself a joke that I know no one else will laugh at just so I don’t feel like I’m losing my edge.

The thing about writing anything though, is that when you come back to it after not having looked at it for some time, it’s a different beast and so are you. No matter how much tripe you’ve expelled onto the page, there are always glimpses at something decent in what you’ve initially laid down, should you care enough to sift through the soup.

And that, funnily enough, leads me onto one of the names I thought about for this blog: Caterpillar Soup. Yes, it’s quite disgusting in some ways, but I’ve always enjoyed the fact that a caterpillar-butterfly spends a small portion of its life as liquid. When a caterpillar pupates, it doesn’t just morph and strain inside itself like an uninitiated werewolf out on the night of a full moon who, up to that point, thought he was just a regular guy called Steve. Instead, it deliquesces completely inside the hard shell of its chrysalis and out of this pulpy chyme a butterfly forms. It feels like a very adolescent metaphor but for good reason, because times of meaningful change in your life can leave you feeling formless and pulverised for a bit. But then you take shape and shuffle out, tender and bruised, having become something else which is made up of everything you have already been.

I then thought about calling it Growth Edge because of a term I heard mentioned on an astrology podcast—yes, I like astrology, so millennial. At first I liked it because it sounded clean and energetic and earthy, like a spade cutting into ground, but the more I thought about it the more it felt like nauseating startup jargon and I had to let it go. Six months ago, I wrote: “In my experience, this kind of [startup] language serves only to cloud meaning rather than clarify it, to make people feel like part of a club, not a community, much as they love that word.”

I still agree.

“Then, I thought about Bold Step”

And that’s where my initial draft ended. [This one is going so much better! Beginning of the end, see you in six months]

Bold Step I liked because to make a change in your life requires courage, bravery, boldness. But also I’m Irish and in Hiberno-English, to be bold means to be naughty, cheeky, mischievous, to do something you probably shouldn’t, no-Santie-for-you-this-year. The Bold Step is also where you might be sent to sit in school or by a particularly over-zealous babysitter if you weren’t behaving as expected. It's a good place to ponder your actions.

And so Bold Step is where this old blog-post-that-never-was ended. I still don’t think it’s a perfect name but I believe in its ethos. I think we’re all very well-behaved and often careers are about meeting expectations—our parents', society’s, our own. But what might happen if we [and yes by ‘we’ I of course on some level mean ‘I’] felt free enough to take the bold steps, to find out what we actually want, to give things a bash even if there’s no money or prestige or whatever but just because we liked it and we were curious. Because we were bold enough.

And so I’ll leave this here before I forget to pick it up for another six months and see what happens. I’m taking suggestions but I can’t promise I’ll like any of them. I can’t even promise this will end up with a decent name. But I can promise that I’ll think about it, that I’ll let it cook, and that I’ll always believe in a bit of boldness.

So go on, tellus, what would you do if you were bold enough?

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash