There are more than a few ways to end up accidentally interrogating your own life.
And one of them, apparently, is trying to name a studio.
You tell yourself, "I'm just looking for a word that feels right. Oh, but, it's gotta mean something. Yeah, and it also needs to sound like itself when I say it out loud." And then suddenly you're six tabs deep in etymology research, staring at pieces of a puzzle you didn't know existed and feeling suspiciously like they've been just waiting for you to find them all this time.
That is how the prefix eigen- found me.
It's a German word meaning something like “own,” “one's own," or "proper," and also sometimes translated as "characteristic" or "intrinsic."
Not something borrowed or assigned. Definitely not something optimized for approval. Just... yours.
I distinctly remember the day it all came together because I wasn't even "supposed" to be working. I had stacked the day with a bunch of errands in the city and yet I found myself eating breakfast ten tabs deep googling the origins of eigen-. (The creative mind and ADHD hyperfocus wants what it wants, when it wants it. 😂)
I played around with eigenwise at first which ultimately meant "your own way of life." Then, like Alice, I found myself all the way down the rabbit hole of Old English, Gaelic, Latin, and French options in a completely different direction than anything to do with my newfound obsessed.
And no matter what I jotted down or came across, I kept coming back to eigenwise, because it was close but it also wasn't quite right either.
I eventually ended up at the point I knew I had to use that prefix, it was just a matter of finding the right suffix. This lead me off to play mix-and-match with abandon:
We had eigenwise, your own way of life.
There was eigencraft, the art of one's own.
Also eigenpath, your own way forward.
Then eigenwerk, the work of one's own.
Oh, and, eigenway, your own way.
I wandered around the house getting ready, saying all the options aloud trying to find the one that felt right to say and hear. My partner just looked at me like, "Are you okay?" to which I naturally responded by holding up my phone with the words typed out and asked him how he'd pronounce them without nothing but the visual.
