About Randomly Jiva

Randomly Jiva officially became a “brand” only a few years ago, but the name—and the idea behind it—had been hanging around for much longer.

For years, I’d tag posts and comments on Facebook with some variation of #RandomThoughts, #RandomlyJiva, #JivaRandom, or whatever happened to fit at the time.

Meanwhile, I was trying to be a writer. And an artist. And a web designer. And a mom. And whatever else I had decided I was going to be that week.

I had different projects, different brands, different social media personalities, and different creative interests, and I could never quite manage to be consistently one thing. Just as I started making progress in one direction, my brain would grab me by the collar and run off toward something else.

Eventually, I realized I was trying to solve the wrong problem.

I didn’t need to figure out which one of those identities was the real one.

They were all me.

I needed one identity big enough to hold all the others.

And that became RandomlyJiva.

RandomlyJiva.com is the umbrella over everything I do—the writing, the art, the design, the businesses, the brands, the ideas that become projects, and probably a few things that haven’t occurred to me yet.

But it also solves another problem I’ve run into over the years: people tend to know the version of me they met.

Someone who knows me as a Mom may have no idea that I build websites; Someone who first encountered me through NaNoWriMo may not know that I also do branding and graphic design. Someone who simply knows me as a goofy chick on FB might hear somebody say, “You should talk to Jiva”—only to wonder what on earth Jiva has to do with the current topic of conversation.

That’s part of what RandomlyJiva.com is for.

It’s the place where all of those versions of me can exist in the same room. If you arrive because you know my writing, you can discover my design work. If you know my art, you can find my businesses. If somebody sends you here because apparently I have told them that “if you want something done and you can’t find anyone, regardless of what it is, ask me…” (and i literally do say that) you7 might have found the right place.

I am one person with multiple tracks of thought, creativity, and interest running at the same time. Sometimes they intersect. Sometimes they have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Sometimes one gets all my attention until another comes barreling down the track demanding its turn.

That’s my existence. RandomlyJiva is simply the first time I stopped trying to make that existence fit neatly into one box.

And much like this website, RandomlyJiva is still figuring out how to pull all of those pieces together and present them in a way that makes sense to everybody else.

But that’s kind of the point.

It doesn’t all have to be the same thing.

It just all has to be me.