My Open-Sourced Personal Tagline

#HAWMC Day 17: Give yourself, or your patient experience a tagine. Grab attention with your slogan. Make sure it’s catchy!

When I saw this prompt, the first thing that popped into my head is the title of the TLC Album from 1990-something, Crazy Sexy Cool. But then I admitted I only have the crazy part down and had to throw it out the window. 

I'm notoriously bad at names and titles, so this is a bit of a tricky one for me. I can be creative when I'm doing so in my own head, which I do hourly, but when put on the spot, I'm pretty rough at it, especially with instructions on "make it catchy".  I get overwhelmed with thoughts like "no that's corny, that's not catchy, blah blah blah. It's like someone saying "tell me a joke, make sure it's funny." Deer in headlights. My outfits are catchy (read: things many people wouldn't wear but I don't really give a *&*$ because I like them) but my taglines and titles, not so much. 

And so, I did what any good 21st century blogger would do: I open-sourced it. Specifically, I posted on Facebook asking people to describe me in one word, and to have fun with it. I specifically mentioned it was for a mental-health-related blog post, to give people the freedom to delve into that arena if they so chose. Here's what I got:

• Multi-facited
• Friend - I'm going to group this in with loyal for purposes of making them all adjectives. 
• Loyal x2
• Optimistic 
• Positive 
• Focused
• Strong
• Enthusiastic
• Inspiring
• Determined
• Motivated
• Smiley

One of my friend wrote "crackers", a joke from freshman year in college when I was eating soup and somehow ended up with crackers on top of my head, which he apparently won't let me live down 18 years later. But, it does lead nicely, on several levels, I suppose, into my own word, which is Messy.

I'm not trying to be a downer after such positive feedback. I don't believe messy needs to have a negative connotation. I mean: I'm all over the place. I don't fit into a nice square box or description or even personality type - I'm an E-I-N-F-J-P on Myer's Briggs, seriously. By nature of my cyclothymia, and it's being rapid cycling, I'm never quite sure what each day holds. Some people wake up on the wrong side of the bed; I wake up on the wrong side of the brain. Sometimes I am social and excitable, sometimes I'm in my own space in my head creating, writing, reading. While I know everyone has several sides of them and nobody can be perfectly categorized, what makes it mood cycling is the frequency and severity of the change. It's not just that I am sometimes social and sometimes not. It's that I'm sometimes hypomanic to the point of being physically unable to sit still and appearing (and feeling) frantic, and then depressed and battling social anxiety to the point that having to see people makes me panic. If you were to illustrate the path of my daily life and brain activity, it would resemble something like a product of the game Spin Art.

From SpinArt Free app - not quite the same effect but a good representation

And so, it appears, my open-sourced tagline is: Motivated-Inspiring-Determined-Enthusiastic-Smiley-Strong-Focused-Positive-Optimistic-Loyal-Multifacited-Messy-Maya. Yep, I think that sounds about right. It might not be catchy, and I guess it grabs attention if you like long-winded tongue twisters. It certainly doesn't fit in a nice little box. Which is just the way I like it.