Hi, it’s me, and me, and… will the real me please step forward?
It’s birthday month and Pluto is back in Capricorn which can only mean one thing… actually it means lots of things, but the pertinent one for now is this:
Some of you have known me for ages through my original newsletter, and some of you are brand new friends. Since I’m in a transformative period this month, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce/reintroduce myself to you with a series of emails showcasing all my relevant parts. There are several reasons for this, and the primary one was kicked off by the Great Website Debacle.
I have been redesigning my website, and after a lot of thought (like, months-worth), I decided to just pull everything together in one place, as a single base, and figure it out. And so after a lot of messing about with domain names and hosting services (the aforementioned Debacle, the details of which I won’t bore you with), I sat down to write the ‘About Me’ page… and… stopped.
For ages, I’ve been trying to follow the ‘find your niche’ crowd. I mean, they talk a lot of sense. If people know what you’re about, they can get behind you, get involved with what you do, use your services or buy your products or whatever. And if your energy seems to be scattered, they choose someone with more focus to fulfil their needs. Which is fine if you’re, say, searching for a teaching position as a professor of history, or if you want to work in a hospital delivering babies. Those are specific jobs for which you need a specific skill set. However I am neither of those things, nor am I searching for any singular position.
The next obvious solution for me, when it became clear that I could not, in fact, niche, was to compartmentalise instead. I built multiple websites, instagram accounts, personas, and attempted to split myself off into multiple personalities to appeal to the individuals who might be interested in those parts of me. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that it got so overwhelming, I stopped posting anything anywhere and retreated entirely back into my shell, even stopping writing for a while.
What’s the point? I thought. It’s impossible to find readers, and who wants to hear from me anyway, when I have so little to share?
I felt like I had so little to share because for each persona, I was only sharing a small piece of myself. So if I had done no writing of my magical children’s series for a while, I obviously had nothing to say, so the socials were silent.
Then I found Substack, and something shifted. A camera adjusting gently until everything came into focus. Here was somewhere I was allowed to be myself. To show up, all of me, all the seemingly disparate parts, messy and unfinished and unsure, and I would be welcomed, and encouraged, and loved just for trying.
And what’s more, I am not the only one who is like this! There are plenty of people who are specialists in their chosen subject or field, who have depth of vision and knowledge, and a singular focus that truly benefits their readers. And there are plenty of others who are as kaleidoscopic as I am, who have lots of different shapes and bright colours and sparkles, and who might show a slightly different picture every time you twist the barrel. And there’s space for both. How wonderful is that!
It is wonderful. But it doesn’t solve the Great Website Debacle or my problem with introducing myself.
Let’s start with something simple.
My name is Jen.
Ok… My name is Jen, and when I write children’s books it’s Jen Jones, and when I write time travel for grown ups it’s Jennifer Sewell, and when I write spiritual non-fiction, it’s Jenny Douglas. My friends call me Jen, the bank calls me Jennifer, and my family call me Jenny, Jenni, Jennie… I am all of these and none of them.
Jen is easy.
If you know any more kaleidoscope people who sometimes wonder who they are, please share this post with them so they know they’re not alone.
I’m a mum. Right? Well, yes… in the south west of England, where I was born and brought up, we had mums. In the north east of England, where I live now, there are mams. My children call me mama, mamma, mammy, mam, mum, mummy, mommy, mother, motha (yes really), motherland, the mothership, and she, as in “She said we’re not allowed to…”
I’ll answer to any of them. (Apart from maybe the last one.) It’s entirely inconsistent; I’ll get any mixture of these per day. I love them all. Can I choose a singular one? No.
Fortunately, I never have to introduce myself with a maternal name! And in all other situations, Jen works fine. For my ‘About Me’ page, though? It might just have to start with Jen there, and ease everyone in gently.
The next hurdle is describing what I do. I’m determined to find a way to hang it all together in one place, but that will necessitate spelling out all the different parts of myself. Mother, yes, woman, yes, wifefrienddaughtersister ok. I am a writer, a storyteller, a teacher. I am an astrologer, a tarot reader, a student of human design. I am an energy worker, a reiki practitioner, a healer with my hands.
I am a meditation teacher. I help people with EFT (tapping). I create subliminals.
I make jewellery and art out of seaglass. I wire-wrap and drill and build with my hands to make tangible pieces to gift and to sell.
None of these are things that fit easily into one word – particularly when I’m standing at the school meet-and-greet beside other parents whose professions fit neatly into brackets of one or two words, instantly recognisable.
I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of which people ask what I do, or the fact that the question isn’t actually what do you do (to which the answer would usually be ‘a lot of laundry’) but how do you get your money? but the results of the rabbit hole will probably bubble out of me one day…
I’m still not entirely sure what the solution is, as regards my ‘About Me’ page, but I suspect it will be something like this, only a bit more streamlined. A list of the things that make me me; a selection of the public-facing parts of me that are also the money-making parts – I’ll save the crochet and the dog love and the health journeys and the daft thought experiments for a safer space – for here, for the substack, for the newsletter, for the place where my people signed up and said Yep! We’d like to hear from You!
The website page will be the curated version. The clean, neat place – as neat as it can be, given the variety of subjects it will be covering. And I think that’s enough.
Welcome to Jen! I’m very happy to meet you. Please introduce yourself to me, in any way you’d like to.