If you were to tell 13-year old me that I would start a blog and continue that for the next 7 years and counting, I would not have believed you. Sure, I would have liked the idea, but who in the world could write blog posts for 7 years?
Turns out, I can!
My last post (Showcase: What Else Can I Do from Encanto) was my 200th post and I wanted to delve in a little deeper into how this was possible.
I have to admit, there were times when I just wanted to ignore the fact that I was running a blog or delete the site altogether because I used to have a lot of pressure that I needed the posts to be perfect and relevant to everyone. But I realised that I'm just documenting moments of my life that I didn't want to forget and I'm sharing them in hopes to inspire others or make them smile. There was no need for it to resonate with everyone because that would be impossible to do. Now I'm just happy to narrate portions of my life in my words. That's why this blog means so much to me.
To me, this blog is about growth, memories, and gratitude.
Now, it wouldn't be a proper celebration if there weren't any major changes made to the blog. There have been quite a few major alterations as the years passed, such as new schedules for posts, monthly special posts, and completely redesigning how the website looks like.
This change, by far, is the greatest because it makes a difference everywhere in my life. This website is now going to be called Life of Elisha (instead of Life of Elysia) because I'm changing how I spell my name!
I've given the English name Elysia myself when I was about three or four years old. I was just getting started in kindergarten and we could pick an English name for ourselves. I loved my name dearly because of how unique it was. Even to this day, I've never known anyone whose name was spelt Elysia.
But as I grew up, I noticed that teachers were having a hard time pronouncing my name the way I wanted to. I hadn't really thought of phonetics when I first got my name but I always asked people to pronounce it eh-lee-sha instead of eh-lis-sia.
Some teachers just ended up calling me on a wide variety of different names like Elysa (understandable), Elisa (with a long i sound), Alicia (A not an E), Elyssia (emphasising the sibilance), and even... Elsa (?? like, you need to drop two letters to get here so??) . I just grew tired of correcting them after a while and responded to these variations pretty well. But I didn't want to continue having this problem at college so I thought of some options.
First, I could just change my English name completely. But instantly, this was out of the question. I'd grown attached to my name and I also thought that it flowed really well with my surname, which is Bae. Then I figured, if I can't make them pronounce it correctly, I'll change the spelling to how it's supposed to sound.
The only thing was that I didn't want the 'uniqueness' to disappear. So I tried to find a way to phonetically spell my name in a bit of a non-traditional way. I was picky in the sense that I wanted to keep my initials as E. B., so Alicia was out of the question.
After multiple letter-repositioning, I finally decided to go with Elisha. It carried all the essence of my old name while the spelling was easy enough for everyone to pronounce it the way I wanted them to. The meaning of the name turned out to be "my God is salvation", which made the name infinitely better and heartwarming.
It's going to take some time getting used to it myself and I'm sure it'll sound unfamiliar for a while (well, it'll sound exactly the same but it'll definitely look different when I write it out). You might still see that on some posts, my former name will be used (e.g. Song Cover by Elysia Bae). I didn't want to change past blog posts because that's just a part of me growing up. But I hope that this new name will stay with me through thick and thin as I start a new chapter in my life.
And of course, thank you so much for supporting me and being the greatest motivation to continue this blog, dear readers!
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