baby animals, photophobia, and your irreducible self

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."

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.

And then I ran into the suffix -kind, which carries the meaning “fundamental nature or quality” or “essence,” among others.

So I started saying it over and over as I drove to the city. When I wasn't saying it out loud, I was thinking about it how it would look in an email signature, url, presentation, contracts, etc. I actually said it so many times by the end of that day my brain kept referring to it as “eigenguard.” For what reason, we shall never know. But it hasn’t happened since, lol.

The more I sat with it, and researched it, the more the word kept opening. Because eigen- is not just a word with good bones. It also has an eerily aligned meaning in mathematics, too—linear algebra, to be specific. 

Stick with me for a minute, I promise there aren't any numbers involved and while mathematics and philosophy of self aren't directly translatable, I invite you to go with the spirit of this.

There's a concept called an eigenvalue/eigenvector pair which describes, in the most plain language, an eigenvector is a direction inside a system that stays itself even when the system tries to transforms it by an eigenvalue. The math can change—you can stretch, rotate, shrink, or otherwise transform—the scale (aka size), but it cannot change the intrinsic orientation without breaking something.

It really stuck with me as I drove around that day and got my mind off on rabbit trails of my rabbit trails.

It's a feeling I suspect many of us knew long before we ever had language for it. 

Feeling it in the jobs where we might hit every benchmark and still end up feeling like we're slowly disappearing. In the systems that everyone else swears by, but we find them impossible to maintain. It's in the versions of adulthood that reward being easy to manage, easy to interpret, and easy to praise.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that survival meant becoming more acceptable. More consistent. More pleasant. And simultaneously more productive, more grateful, and more low-maintenance. While also being less sensitive. Less inconvenient and less visible in our wanting. 

And to be fair, those adaptations are often necessary, albeit unconscious, wisdom of our body adapting to our environment and circumstances. Not random or weakness. Nor are they proof that you made bad choices or lacked self-respect.

Sometimes they are what it took to stay safe.
Sometimes they are what it took to stay employed.
Sometimes they are what it took to stay loved, or at least necessary as a way of belonging, inside systems that punish difference long before they ever celebrate it. 

I think a lot of burnout lives in that difference.

In the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending years trying to become compatible with structures that were never designed with your actual nature in mind. Not all burnout, mind you. Bodies are more complicated than a single paragraph and so are lives.

We say that we need more discipline or better routines. I can still hear my own voice through all of my 20s saying, "I need to stop being so all over the place. I just need to try harder."

We rarely say:

That is the part of this linear algebra concept that kept coming back up for me. You can be transformed by your life without becoming unrecognizable to yourself. You can be asked to stretch and still remain yours. You can outgrow old stories and evolve into new versions of yourself without betraying your own nature.

It's an idea that has been, at times unbeknownst to me, quietly living behind all the work I've done with clients over the years and my own burnout recovery. Trying to find a way back to our eigenkind and building a life and business that supports it. 

What started out as a name for my consulting studio turned into a way to name this thing I think many of us have felt our whole lives. Your own fundamental nature. The intrinsic character or essence that belongs specifically to you. But most of all, that this part of you remains itself under pressure.

The longer I've sat with this word, the more I truly believe I was meant to create it. My research even brought me to a German fairy tale (or at least attributed as German) documented by Brothers Grimm titled, “Das eigensinnige Kind” which translates to “The Willful Child.”

The story itself is gruesome and very telling of the times (you can read it here, it's only a paragraph long) but what I took from it is the label of the willful child—the stubborn one. And the older I get, I see that label and think it’s negative connotation is often misattributed. Because they are often just the one who keeps pulling against what doesn't fit. The one who has not fully bought into the cultural story that becoming easier for other people is the same thing as becoming better.

I don't think we talk enough about how young we are when the world starts negotiating with that part of us. How early we learn which instincts make adults uncomfortable. Which needs get deemed dramatic, which rhythms get called lazy, which sensitivities get treated like obstacles to overcome instead of information to honor.

And don't forget capitalism's favorite bedtime story: that your highest purpose is to become more useful while asking for less.

It doesn't discriminate based on gendered expectations. We may be conditioned differently based on them, but it happens to us all, either way.

And if you are neurodivergent, chronically ill, disabled, queer, a person of color, traumatized, an immigrant, or just inconveniently human in any number of ways, that pressure often gets turned up even higher (or worse, layered on top of each other.)

You learn to translate yourself early on. To pre-edit and over-communicate in hopes that you'll save yourself energy by making it (*cough* you *cough*) easier for others to digest. You learn to perform capacity you do not have, borrowing from tomorrow to get through today. You even learn to call self-abandonment maturity.

Is it any wonder that so many abandoned planners and apps and morning routines start to look like personal evidence? No, it’s no surprise that we see this graveyard of productivity accumulate only to feel like it's a character witness against us.

But what if instead of treating it like a haunted graveyard, we looked at it as a pattern map? What if each abandoned system is less a monument to your inconsistency and more a breadcrumb trail back to your actual wiring? 

This one died when your energy changed.
That one collapsed the second life stopped being predictable.
These only worked when you were anxious enough to over-function.
And that section over there rewarded a version of you that could produce on command but never recover afterward. 

I know that doesn't solve everything. A good reframe does not magically dismantle rent, grief, caregiving, deadlines, ableism, or the thousand practical realities that shape our lives. But sometimes naming a thing correctly is its own form of relief. Sometimes the first kindness is simply meeting yourself with, “Oh. I'm not failing at being a person. I'm colliding with structures that keep asking me to betray something fundamental within me.”

And maybe the work, then, is not to become infinitely adaptable.

^{_{(She says from experience.)}}

Maybe the work is to notice what in you has stayed pointed in the same direction all along. The needs that keep resurfacing or the pace that actually lets you think. The environments and people where your body unclenches. The kinds of support that feel clarifying and the parts of you that keep returning no matter how many times you try to train them out of existence.