With My Name On It

December 18, 2025

An incredibly convoluted announcement of changes coming next year, as only an Enneagram 4 could write. XOXO – Jeannie Rose

“Why don’t you have a website using your name?”

It was the third or fourth time someone had suggested it recently, as I’ve been seeking advice and on how to build the platform I apparently need to sell a book.

It’s a totally normal approach, on display as I attend a workshop on growing a newsletter, where the instructor glories in the joys of self-promotion, practically singing out the words like a kid would ‘Disneyland!’ The audience buys in, chat full of confetti emojis and exclamation points as they manifest their own expanding subscriber count. Helpful as her tips for generating hype undoubtedly are, I leave feeling a disorienting mixture of inadequacy—I’m not sure I can do that—and queasiness—I’m not sure I want to.

I feel more resonance with a client’s reaction, while discussing the proliferation of self-named ministries in a certain era/corner of Christendom, revulsion spreading across her face at even the suggestion in jest that she call the work by her given name. “Even in that era, I don’t think that would fly here,” she avows, brushing away the unseemly hypothetical of sounding like that kind of in-it-for-self ministry, those kinds of arrogant people.

“Oh shoot,” I think; “if I had a website using my name, good folk like this would think that about me.”

I struggle to speak of building a platform without a mixture of embarrassment and distaste. The antipathy toward self-promotion is deeply ingrained. “Don’t toot your own horn,” I remember my father warning. A good writer shows with stories, but I recall none, just the frequency of that phrase, drilled in from early on.

Yet, gulp, I have a dirty little secret: I want my horn tooted.

Last week I watched a friend lead an Enneagram workshop, teaching about this idea she called core longings. She explained “we all have an answer to the question: ‘If only I could have ___, I would be OK.’ Underneath that is a legitimate need, but we tend to have this false way of meeting it.”

I immediately knew my answer to the question. My legitimate need is to be enough. My false way of meeting it is to be special. Hello from your friendly neighborhood Enneagram 4! I’ve been conditioned toward a visceral allergy to “building a platform,” even as I’m wired to yearn for the specialness I think it would confer, making me (finally) enough.

Your core longing may be different, you may not be tempted to meet it like I do mine—but longing is part of being human. As is the allure of a solution to our dissatisfaction, the habit of seeking it in things that don’t work. It isn’t like you don’t know your false attempts to meet it are false. As if my soul would find rest in a book deal. As if ultimate peace comes from reaching your goal weight or winning that person’s approval or [fill in the blank]. But just look at the lives we live in its pursuit.

If not in pursuit of the desire directly—then perhaps fear-based avoidance is more your speed? Why not deny desire—if your desire is not only ineffective, but wrong—the cardinal sin of horn-tooting! Easier to stuff it than wrestle with something so powerful, seeking to rein it rightly. You want to be special but horn-tooting is bad? Instead of becoming big on self-promotion, you hide. But hiding in fear isn’t humility, or stewardship. And it doesn’t even shake the yearning—because it’s rooted in a legitimate need.

When I built my website, I had meaningful reasons for calling it “Tangible.” The blog began as an insistent attempt to look for the mythical specialness in my ordinary—to find the glorious and the divine in the tangible elements of everyday life. This theme makes its way into most of my writing, and I’ve convoluted essay descriptions on the About section. But when the workshop hype coach asks for the one sentence hook, I come up empty.

But as I yet again awkwardly fail to concisely answer the question “why Tangible?” it hits me. The name may have meaning, but it’s rooted less in strategy than fear.

In seeking to engage people with ideas and offerings I believe in—writing, services & spaces that help people to grow into who God has made them to be—I want to be a steward of what I’m creating. I want to expand. I want to share this work with more people.

Even if acknowledging that stiffens every muscle in my ‘no-horn-tooting’ body. Even if I’m afraid it opens the pandora’s box of false desire for special.

“What if I become a person I don’t want to become?” I confide to my agent.

“You have an agent, a husband, a family, a community, who will keep you grounded,” he assures me.

Twenty years earlier, during my senior year in college, a beloved professor took me on a walk. “Are you going to apply to law school?”

I had the same visceral reaction then I have now to the idea of a website with my name on it. “Ew, no,” I think I spat out, with what I now begrudgingly recognize as contempt. I’d heard a lot about what happened at law school. It was where good Christians went to lose their faith and become money-grubbing and soul-sucked. “Why would you ask that?”

“Well, you have the grades for it,” he replied, and though I hadn’t explained my underlying resistance, he added, “And I have faith in you. That if you went to law school, you wouldn’t lose yourself.”

That prompting wasn’t ultimately why I went to law school, but it was the encouragement I needed to face the underlying fear. And nothing helps clarify decisions like identifying and addressing fear. When I was able to be honest with myself about my fear, and trust—not so much his words, but God’s goodness—I felt able to wade into waters that had frightened me and rest in a security I didn’t have to manufacture. And I didn’t lose myself, not then, not nearly two decades into this adventure.

Don’t get me wrong: I made a ton of cringe-worthy choices. But even when I failed to live up to who I hoped to be, God held me. Neither failure nor success as a lawyer (or human) were bigger than God’s care for me. In fact, walking with God makes either circumstance just another arena for God to work in, material for shaping toward our true self.

So, twenty years of affirming this principle with my legal career and I’ve got it all figured out!

(As my five year old like to say when she realizes something is tongue in cheek, proud to be in on the game: joke!)

More like, here I am twenty years later, same fears, new forum, a mentor bestowing the same gift of graced assurance I didn’t realize I needed.

What my agent is really saying: I can be helped to resist the allure of chasing false solutions to my legitimate need—because I can meet that need the way it is meant to be met, and I have a community who helps anchor me in this truth. Whatever your version of core longing is, the solution isn’t denying the need or false solutions, but going to the source. I am enough not because I make myself so sparkly (or perfect the art of humility) but because of who God has made me, how God sees me.

So I’m afraid of putting my name on my website. Afraid of good people like my client furrowing their brow—who does she think she is? Afraid I’m setting myself up for a more painful fall if I go for it and can’t make it happen. That I will feel foolish for having dared to think I could do it. How fun that we’re so clever we can come up with so many variations of fear!

In the face of all this fear we can’t necessarily escape, we can make a decision about what we do with it. Do we want to live in subjection to fear?

No, people. No. No, I don’t.

Advisors keep telling me a name change for the website is the strategic choice. Are they right? I don’t know, but I know my resistance is largely rooted in fear. I also know if our identify is ultimately rooted in God—not our perfection, achievement, specialness—it’s safe to fail. We can afford to experiment and be wrong. The more we test that through experience, the more deeply identity roots in what is real and true.

In 2026, I’m going to experiment by following the advice I’ve been given, and seeing where it leads. Coming soon, a new website.

With my name on it.