By Yaldaz Sadakova
Photo by Yaldaz Sadakova
This time last year is when I finally decided on the name Foreignish for this website.
It took me more than a year to come up with that name.
I wanted to avoid using the words immigrant or expat. They’re so clichéd, and they evoke so many stereotypes.
I wanted a more creative name to convey that the platform I had in mind was about creative writing rather than news. About nuanced immigration stories rather than stereotypical pieces.
I started brainstorming. The list of names I came up with was awful.
- Belong
- Belong Fully
- The Rootless Republic
- Hyphenated
- Not Sure Where Home Is
- Home, Elusive Home
- Glocal (that sounds like glaucoma; what I meant was “both global and local”)
None of these names felt right. I hated them all.
Then I went to a Vipassana meditation retreat.
At the start of the retreat, before the 10-day meditation course began, I met a young woman, Preethi.
“There’s this website I want to create, a website for creative writing about immigration, but I can’t come up with a name. It’s driving me crazy,” I told her.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The name will come to you when the time is right.”
More than half a year passed.
I still didn’t have a name, even though I’d started writing some of the stories that I would eventually publish.
I was still referring to my project as “my website.”
I started to worry.
Then, out of nowhere, the word foreignish came to me.
I don’t remember how the word was planted in my head.
I don’t remember if I was doing the dishes or jogging when it came to me.
It felt more like it had always been there, and it had just been a matter of quieting my mind so I could hear it.
The moment I became aware of that word, I loved it.
I knew it was the right word because it captured the existential state I was in, the state I wanted to write about on this new platform.
That ambiguous, angst-inducing state of being neither completely foreign nor completely local.
Then I checked if that domain name was available.
Miraculously, it was!
If you’ve had to buy a domain name, you know how hard it is to come up with something that hasn’t been taken. It’s harder than naming a baby.
So I grabbed my credit card, entered the number, and just like that became the proud owner of Foreignish.net. ♦
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