A whole new Lyndsey, starting 11 Nov 2017
So, earlier this year, the lovely G proposed! Which was both unexpected and very happy-making. I’ve ummed and aahed since, about whether to change my name or not or whether to double-barrel it or have both without the hyphen or just commit. I decided to just commit.
The main point of it is for us to properly feel – and be recognised by the wider world as – a unit. There’s a lot more to the whole subject but it would be too tedious an explanation for anyone other than me and G. It’s important to us, and that’s all that matters.
However, I’ve spent the last 17 years as ‘Michaels’, a surname I chose to give myself at the same time as I changed my first name. All of my business dealings have been done under Michaels and I have a lot of work-related capital wrapped up in that name. Over that time, I’ve very deliberately not separated ‘work’ from ‘life’, at least when it comes to social media and so on. Social media itself is a different landscape though these days and over the last two or three years especially, I’ve noticed that I tend to shy away from putting anything personal out there, anywhere other than on Facebook, probably in an effort to keep my google-ability nice and clean.
Getting married and making plans for our life together has focused my attention and I now feel I’ve become a bit one-dimensional, letting ‘life’ happen in the margins. With my business well established, I now have an ideal opportunity to compartmentalize it a bit and draw some (much needed) lines between work and home.
It’s an interesting exercise and it’s surprised me just how challenging it is to decide where precisely to draw those lines. I’m hoping by early next year, I’ll have made some future-proofing decisions about the direction(s) I want my work to go in as well as having made some decisions about what I want my personal life to look like. I’m hoping to use this space for things that don’t suit a snappy one-liner on Facebook or a quick Tweet. I might even have a look at Instagram, people tell me it’s all the rage these days. Most of all though, I want this to be a ‘proper blog’, whose main audience is me and with little thought given to readership and followers and what not.
A place for me to reincarnate, one more time with feeling.