“I never knew what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be”.

Diane Von Furstenberg.

January 25th, 2020

Years back at age fourteen, I was trying to be a typical high school student, ticking the educational boxes and trying to keep the people around me happy whilst as usual, trying to find my own little spot in this world. High school can be a life-changing time and it most certainly was for me with the constant pressure of decisions which just seemed to get bigger and bigger – so many of which were linked to identity. And it got me thinking about my own identity and who I wanted to be, and somehow I started with my name. Which of course is rather unique and something I hadn’t really thought about before, my name was unique and so was I. So I literally set out to find and embody the “uniqueness.” What a weird thing for a fourteen-year-old to do hey? And I know this because, on February 11th 2011, I began my diary and writing to myself with whatever I had within me at the time. So within me at fourteen was a desire to try and work myself out now and start with my identity to others. 

At this point, I was on a few social medias just as they were starting to boom, including a hidden Facebook account from @mummahbarnes under my alias name “Amy Louise Reid”. So upon reflection, my search for my identity was obviously much deeper than it seemed. I decided to begin by embodying my real name which I so often had simplified to NayNay or asked people to call me by my comparatively simple middle name. Naarah was on the cards again so I logged onto Facebook, changed my name back and thought that this simple step was a step in the right direction. Feeling proud of myself by choosing to own my name and my identity, I already felt better. Encouraged by the shift, I decided to use the uniqueness as a tool and change everything I could to “Naarah” and remove my middle name and other names I’d previously created for myself. Gamer tags, labels, signature, everything I could think of until it got to the relatively new platform of Instagram. Where I found out someone else had scored the username “naarah”. To add to my shock, I did some minor stalking and found out that I’d had Instagram before them with the chance to have had that name forever and I instead created some fake name with no identity of myself at all. I hadn’t believed in my “weird” name until now. But times were a-changing for this young fourteen-year-old gal and that meant change. 

I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to use just my name again if I could help it. Hence my next move was googling pages and pages to find the only website that showed naarah.com.au as being available on. I spent my entire paycheck as a barista at my local bakery job on buying this website. A website I wasn’t planning on using for a long time, maybe even never. But all on the basis of I need to find my identity and believe in my name. So here I am today, proudly typing words onto a website dedicated to that fourteen-year-old girl trying to find herself. I owned this website for a total of seven years before I finally did anything with it. Lots has changed since, but that fourteen-year-girl choosing to find herself years ago, found herself and continues to every day. 

Welcome to naarah.com.au – watch this space for more of my journal to come! xx