To say I hate change would be overstating the case a bit. I pride myself on being highly adaptable, and my profession is one — what with the rotation of clients, the outflow of pitches, and the inflow of ever-changing deadlines and demands — in which being allergic to routine can be an asset. But I am also a creature of habit, and the time-worn phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is one I take to the absolute outer limits of its truth.
The first time I thought about changing my avatar, I’d not even had it a whole year. An individual with a misunderstanding of what it meant to be “Top Editor” on the tags took it upon himself to start a “Down with Jayarrarr” campaign to end my tenure as the tag editor who happened to promote the most popular posts in any given 24-hour period. He “borrowed” my avatar for this campaign, photoshopping a red circle around my face with a bar across it, something we often do to indicate the thing in the circle is bad.
But I didn’t change my avatar. Instead, I decided to stand my ground, and that avatar ultimately became my image on every website and platform I used — all in the name of recognizability and consistency. Since I make my living on the internet, my image is to some extent my “brand,” and the most successful brands are those that employ consistent imagery so that over time people automatically recognize and connect it with particular (hopefully high quality) products and services.
In a sense, then, changing my avatar is a bit like closing an era. It was an era that, itself, saw many changes in my life, although perhaps you wouldn’t know it to look at my sepia-toned face glancing down at my computer that calm, cool morning. My life was very much in flux when that picture was taken: my apartment had been broken into recently, I’d only just recovered my car which had been stolen, and although obviously I had no way of knowing this at the time, I was about a month away from losing my job.
Perhaps I am a different person now than I was then — a full-time professional writer, a business owner, a publisher — but deep down I’m still the same girl today that I was two years ago. After all, in both pictures I’m actually wearing the same sweater.
© 2014 by Jennifer R.R. Mueller