Every time I hand my business card to someone, or tell someone my e-mail or website address, they ask me what “Forindet” is. Since I live abroad and have an unconventional name nobody heard of before, the question sometimes is “what does Forindet mean”, as people assume it is a word in my native language. So I’ve decided to answer this question early on here on the blog and reveal the whole story behind “Forindet”.
It all started back in high school. I’ve always enjoyed writing and telling stories, and there was a special collection of stories I used to write in collaboration with a friend. We called them “diaries” as they were written in a diary form. They were usually supposed to be the diaries of famous historical figures and followed their everyday life and described random imaginary events that supposedly led to big breakthroughs, discoveries or works of art they’ve produced. It was all made for fun and the stories were all rather silly and ridiculous and we laughed quite a lot while creating them. The first ever diary we wrote (or what I remember to be the first) was of a very important literary figure in Bulgarian history, who’s work kickstarted the Bulgarian renaissance. Later those diaries spread over to made up characters, mocking different literary genres and cliché movie plots, the most notable example being our masterpiece the sci-fi diary of captain Skruuber.
Ok so what does all of this have to do with Forindet? Well one day we started a diary, inspired by fantasy stories and the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and all that good stuff. The diary belonged to one of those knights, but it was in fact kept by his squire, who was describing all the awesome heroic deeds of his master (which were neither awesome, nor heroic). In this story Forindet was a very minor character that was mentioned as a part of some other knight’s backstory. I remember laughing quite a lot while writing it, so maybe that’s why the name stuck with me later.
Forindet was a fearsome sorceress, surrounded by mystery. Everyone were terrified of her and thousand worriers tried to fight her only to come back home crying like little girls, if I remember correctly. In fact the reader was never told of anything she actually did to back up her reputation. As for the name itself and what it means, it is just a random made up name. I’ve always enjoyed making up words and names for my characters, but I think her name derived from the word “foreign”, maybe because the character was somewhat alien and strange to the people in her universe. That actually makes it relatable for me as well.
So how did Forindet become my online pseudonym? Again it was all pretty random. At that time I never used my real name on line, it wasn’t the standard back then and after some experience with a creepy online stalker I had even less intention to do so. In fact in those days I used different name for each and every account I’ve created, so no connections can be made. I think I first used Forindet as a user name for my Deviant Art account. At the time I didn’t even mean to post anything as I was quite nervous and insecure about showing my creations to other people. I made the account, because my cousin asked me to vote for her in a competition on dA, so I registered with the first name that came to mind, voted for her and forgot all about it. It wasn’t until much later that I started actually uploading stuff to my dA profile.
As I became more serious about my illustration and design aspirations and starting to create an online presence on different platforms I started using Forindet more and more often as my user name. There are many reasons for that. For one I saw my starting to upload illustrations to DeviantArt as the start of my visual arts career and “Forindet” was a symbol for a new beginning. Over time I started considering using my own name or creating an online name that made more sense and actually meant something not just for me, but also for others. I’ve experimented with many different names and ideas, but none really stuck with me and gave me the meaning I was looking for. My own name is long and as I live abroad often makes as much sense for people as Forindet does, it was also quite often taken and I wasn’t willing to add numbers and what not to it to be able to use it as a user name. So for all its flaws (weird, unheard of, meaningless, unrelated to my name) Forindet had also many advantages- short, always available, relatively easy to remember (I was told so) and connected to my journey of becoming a designer.
I still wonder every now and then whether it is a smart choice to use a random name such as Forindet for self branding purposes. I even postponed redesigning my website for way too long, because I wasn’t sure I should stick with the domain, but in the end I kept coming back to it. I didn’t feel “at home” with other domain names I thought of and many of them were unavailable anyway.
I suppose Forindet is here to stay for the time being and I’ll probably have to explain again and again what it means. I rarely go for the long version of the story as I just did, but at least it is now out there.
