When I was younger, I used to scoff at Miley Cyrus for not using her birth name. “That’s not even her real name,” I used to say, wondering “what kind of name is Miley anyway?” I was a hater, I’ll admit it. I’ll also admit that “Miley Ray” sort of rolls off the tongue better than “Destiny Hope” but…who really cares anyway? If girl wants to own a different name than the one that was given to her, so be it. If she wants to use her legal name, so be it. If another girl wants to add a $ to her stage name, so be it.

When babies are in the womb, the first question most people ask are “have you thought of any names yet?” Teenagers might read a book and think “Hmm…you know I’d change my name to Renesmee*”. Adults look at a child and say, “She definitely acts like a Hannah.” Supposedly, a name defines who you are and adds meaning to your life. We applaud when we hear classic names like “Reginald” being called but side-eye the mom who dares name her kid something like “North” or “Chickpea”.

And what about the people who choose their own names? People like Miley. Or people who change their names regularly like Snoop….what is it now? Lion? Zilla? Is there a limit to the amount of aliases we take? And what about those who change only their last names like Katy Hudson (aka “Perry”).

Our names are gifts given to us – maybe inspired by God or maybe inspired by Jersey Shore. However, for many working individuals, it’s also a brand. It’s marketing. It’s a persona you take on whenever you meet people. For some reason, though, when a person is smaller and not so famous it’s big enough of a deal that someone’s going to mock it. On a small island like mine, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to hear, “Oh that’s not even his real name. It’s actually Vincent.” Apparently, it’s just so ridiculous when someone decides to use a name other than the one s/he was born with.

Maybe it is. Maybe it’s blasphemous. Maybe it’s a sign of disrespect to those who gave us our names.

Ruzelle Almonds is not my legal name. It’s the one on my business license but not on my driver’s license. As you might guess, it’s been met with some back lash because it’s “childish” or “sounds dumb” or “where does that name even come from”. It doesn’t matter that this name has meaning, history and value to me. I’ve had people tell me they won’t use my business name and insist on using my legal one. I’ve had family members ask about it because am I “not proud of where I came from?”

Honestly, it’s not that serious. It’s not even so serious that I have to write about it. But I AM writing about it because my domain name is changing. Don’t panic. It means nothing other than the fact that I can no longer be defined by the prefix “miss”.

But if I decided to rebrand myself Sparkles McRainbowPants** would it matter? Probably… now that I see it typed out, but the point is that it shouldn’t matter what I ask you to call me. I’m still working hard, either way.

A Ruzelle by any other name is still as awesome.

Catch this Ruzelle at http://www.mizzalmonds.com (aka right here).

* Maybe don’t? Or do. Whatever.
** Weird cartoon character or bad stripper name? 

As of now we’re already a little bit into the New Year, which for a lot of us means that we’ve already failed our resolutions. I myself ended up not completing half of the goals I set last year. NBD. Don’t sweat it. On the other hand, I ended up figuring out a system that helps me get through each week. The reason I don’t normally make year end goals is because disappointment can be harsh if you don’t make it the way you wanted to.

The good news, though, is that I was finally able to get to a place where I was being reasonable with myself in regards to not meeting expectations. That’s the hardest part of setting goals: dealing with yourself after you don’t make it all the way. Some people just don’t. It might not be their fault or maybe it was but that’s beside the point. The point is, whatever the reason is (unless you were being a dillhole) it’s all okay and it’s easily something to learn from. These are four ways that I’ve been able to make it through the week.

Declutter

First and foremost, clear out. All the time. Not just in the beginning of the month or the end of the year. Anytime you have a minute, get rid of all the junk. That includes mail subscriptions (both snail and electronic), things that you know you don’t need but are nice to have, wardrobe no matter how much nostalgia they bring (or upcycle into a quilt or something). Decluttering your life helps to declutter your mind, giving you that much more headspace to think about other things – like taking a poop and cooking dinner.

Check in with yourself

Don’t be too shy to ask yourself how you’re doing. Take some time throughout the day to see how you’re feeling and then figure out what you need & how much time you have to give it to yourself. Sometimes you need a little prayer or meditation in the middle of your day. It might seem like losing time but this could greatly affect how you function for the rest of the day.

This can also include tracking when you go to the bathroom, meals, water consumption. Sometimes we forget to take care of basic human needs, that’s an understatement. It might seem insignificant but knowing how your body is functioning tells you your needs and that’s serious pay off in terms of taking care of your body.

Set weekly goals (attainable goals) 

Give meaning to your goals. Maybe your doctor is telling you to eat more fiber and yeah yeah yeah it’s healthy for you but what does that mean for you?

Each goal should be personal and purposeful. This is not a checklist or a to do list. Weekly goals are small ways of self improvement that you can work on little by little. It’s easier to track progress this way and your goals don’t seem as daunting. I do my weekly goals by setting three areas of improvement: body, mind and soul. Sometimes, I have goals for all three, sometimes two. They range from ‘track 8 glasses of water every day’ to ‘run 12 miles this week’ to read a chapter out of a new book.

You can also work a new year’s resolution into this. For example: Resolution to get fit!

You can start by saying go to the gym for a total of 2 hours this week or try water aerobics. And if you don’t make that goal, ask yourself why and adjust from there. You could either carry the goals over to the next week, cut it down or choose a different activity that could work toward the same purpose. But no matter what you do, never think to yourself what you could be doing if you had. That doesn’t matter. What matters is what you could do to make the goal more accessible to you.

Me time, EVERY DAY

Every morning, I make it a goal to stretch, pray & devotional and eat in the first two hours of my day every day (given that I didn’t wake up late and have to be somewhere in ten minutes). It took me a long time to stop feeling guilty about this, I can’t even tell you.

There’s nothing wrong to giving something your whole self (i.e. a project or a job) and everything you got. I don’t doubt that your works of passion aren’t worth it. But think of it this way: if you lose yourself into the thing you’re doing, you might stop why you’re doing it. That’s not something you want to forget. At the end of the day, the person you’re left with is yourself and you might as well get used to it.

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Now, if you’re still not satisfied after a long trial and error, figure out why and adjust. It might be something that you’re missing OR you still haven’t figured out how to handle certain emotions or stressors. In either case, once you get your lead you’re that much closer to self satisfaction. You might need help, through another party, and that’s okay as long as you get there.

The point of this post is to encourage you to encourage yourself. For people like me, we get easily disheartened and the crux of it is easily ourselves. I want you to challenge yourself in this way. Check in with yourself, be realistic when you set an expectation and don’t freak out if you didn’t meet it. In a world that seems to be turning faster and faster every minute, self care is becoming increasingly more important. These are just some examples of how to do that in such a world.

Let me start off by saying that I’m not saying that I’m old in this blog. Of course, this is a recurring theme in all kinds of blogs – stuff that we knew when we were young. I know this, you know this: things change as time does. And bizarrely, I’m pretty sure it’s my generation who is the most vocal about it. Everyone gets nostalgic, and everyone flips out when they see a kid on YouTube with bewildered eyes as they figure out a Motorola Razr. And I can basically hear your mind when you see someone listening to music on their smartphone and think “dang kid doesn’t have to worry about their cd walkman skipping”.

This is just a mere examination.

I was cleaning my room. In a certain area of my desk, I’ve stored my old HP tower with Windows 7 (which has blue-screened), a ton of CDs and old electronics. Normally, I pay no mind to any of this and wipe it down with a rag but this time around, I was a lot more active in going through them. I realized that most of these CDs (stuff like printer/camera software and games like Oregon Trail for Windows 2000) will probably never be used again. So digging around, I pulled out the 1st generation iPod nano I bought for myself when I was a tween. I got into a conversation with a colleague and after discovering its battery is still good, he asked me what the oldest song in my iTunes library is. That got me thinking about what it was like for me 10 years ago. So let’s talk about it.

2006.

The internet. 

Back when being on the internet only meant you had access to a computer. Popularity was measured by the number of people who ‘owned’ your profile picture and bands you listened to that no one else did not by the number of retweets or hashtags you jumped on. The internet was all about being the most tragically poetic and emphasizing how extraordinarily different you were, not how viral your selfie could get in two days.

At this point, xanga was still relevant. Most of my friends can say they’ve had one at some point. At the time, I was creating css for xanga and graphics on Jasc software. Customization was trending so people were changing their layouts every couple of weeks, and a number of them included an animated cursor or a title bar that looked *~xX Sumting LyK diS xXxoOo~*. When people began transitioning to Myspace, CSS-creators followed the train making a new formula for the new format. Sometimes people went overboard and going to their page was an actual nuisance but it was actually a thing to go to someone’s MySpace just to see what it looked like: “omgeeee, ur page is 2 kyoot!!! wer did u get ur lyt?? ^_^”.

Communication.

4 words: Five Hour Phone Calls. With as many people as you could possibly get, as long as everyone had 3-way calling. I remember one night, we made it to like 8 people before people started getting disconnected. SMS was the optimal way to communicate with someone on the go….if the message even got through…if you had load. But it was k cause we didn’t necessarily expect a reply within the hour. …plus you were probably using your mom’s phone to text anyway.

Sharing.

Trying to fit in as many songs as you could into a disc that only holds a couple hundred MB. When you only had an iTuned library if you had an iPod…which held 1GB of music. And if you REALLY had to send someone something electronically, email and IM was your gurl. Or if you were really cool (and within 100 feet of someone), bluetooth messaging.

Quick mention of me in high school checking to see if anyone had their bluetooth on so I could send them weird pictures. But I changed my bluetooth name, for anonymity of course.

But of course, this was also the height of downloading so you spent the night probably trying to see if your favorite songs could be downloaded via P2P or someone’s xanga. Or even if the whole album could be found via torrent. All the while making sure that the file wasn’t a virus. Sometimes, though you would download a song and it turned out not to be that song but on the other hand, you discovered someone you could be elitist about.  Did I mention that we might be responsible for music not being on MTV anymore? Disclaimer: I’m pretty sure this is not nearly as prevalent now as it was then. Illegal downloading is wrong, yo….although Streetlight Manifesto kinda encouraged it to get back at their label.

Music. Culture. Trends.

I’m squeezing this together because these are all essentially the same thing. I remember specifically coming of age when more was more…clothing style-wise. Quick mention of fringe bangs and raccoon eyes aside…the general style was sleeves, hoodies, ties, gloves, beanies, bracelets, jeans, long socks if you weren’t wearing jeans, and black. Lots. And lots of black. It was a poetic expression of the amount of layers you had to get through in order to really understand the destroyed soul that lingered underneath.

And all of this was influenced by the people we were seeing in the music videos on MTV and TRL (which would still be a thing for a couple more years). Simple Plan. Hawthorne Heights. AFI. Avril Lavigne (pre Best Damn Thing). Fall Out Boy. Taking Back Sunday. Panic! At the Disco. All Time Low. Paramore. My Chemical Romance. Or really anyone who’s screaming the words we keep bottled up for the purpose of angst. Get acquainted with this wonderfully nostalgic playlist.

A time one might refer to as the Millennial Emo era.

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Again, the reason for this little rambling blog is not to put down the kids who entered high school after I had graduated. Or to invalidate their experiences or say that ours was better or more authentic (though I might appreciate my tween/teenhood better than I do theirs). It’s meant to be (a throwback and) a commentary on how different it was, looking back. How much can change in five years. My little sister, who is only 4 years younger than me, rang in her teen years to such vastly different music, trends, different methods of communication. Adversely, my oldest sibling (4 years older than me) and I did not.

And it makes me really wonder how much is going to change. And it makes me even wonder more what the actual name of the era of my adolescent years will be called in 40-50-100 years from now.

What I do know is that I’m going to hold on to that 1st generation, 2gb iPod nano until it becomes so old that I’ll be able to sell to to some hipster on eBay for good money. Assuming that hipsters and eBay will still be relevant then, anyway.