by Keisha Pittman, Miss April 2014

NAME – it’s something you’re born into, something you’re given or in the case of social media, it’s something you pick for yourself.

Sometimes it fits like a cozy sock, slipping on and fitting tight as a glove. Sometimes it’s something you have to grow into like your dad’s clumsy shoes when your little and stumbling around the house.

Sometimes its representative of a time in your life of even better an embarrassing moment you had.

Maybe it’s my inner You’ve got Mail  Meg Ryan psyche, but as social media continues to grow and we all have to keep developing our “handles”, I’m always curious what the letters and numbers that make up who we “are” to the world say about us. Of course, we all stay on heightened alert to not use any important numbers like our social security number, address or birthday (yes, those are all typical pin codes…be smart people!), but when you choose a number, I’m assuming it has to be something very important to you; and the letters even more significant.

BIGPITTSTOP – it’s a name that chose me.

My sister has always been the athlete in the family. And, when I say “the” athlete, I’m referring to the fact that only one existed. I’m clumsy and I don’t like to sweat; it’s a title she earned all on her own! She’s never been one to be called her actual name and you can tell what part of life people know her from based on the name they call her. But, the one that stuck for the majority of her life was lil pitt. When she started her freshman year of high school, I started my senior year. So, being the younger, and opposite, version of me she had to have her own identity. So, lil pitt stuck and somehow big pitt developed.

While I never really “went” by it, I kind a liked it because I knew to be big pitt, lil pitt had to be just around the corner…and I’m a BIG fan of lil pitt.

So, sometime later when I developed a landing page for my shutterfly photo account, I came up with my own combination – “big pitt” and “pit stop” and mashed them together. Seemed like a cheeky little play on words in an emerging “personalized” website forum. Yes, I’m talking like 2004.

March of 2008 came and I found myself quickly needing to develop one of those “blog things” to communicate a series of information to a large and somewhat anonymous group of people. I wasn’t interested in inundating my Facebook followers with the news of my recent cancer diagnosis, but I was also tired of sharing the same thing over and over. So, as I typed in “blogspot.com” for the first time, I felt the pressure of forming a creative name that might not just be representative of this “time” in my life but would be personal enough to be a space only I could use for a long time.

Drunk on the emotion of a tough diagnosis, I was stripped of creativity and normal thinking so I just went with something I already had created – bigpittstop. Made sense. Seemed short. So I hit submit and my blog world opened.

It wasn’t until a week later, while I was having a conversation with a way more savvy communications friend that I realized an underscored play on words that had organically come about. Cancer (which we’ll talk about next week) wasn’t going to get me… it was just a pit stop.

I’m not sure what a pit stop is to you – might be a gas station, a scenic pull off, or a friendly visit along the way to somewhere else. If you’re a NASCAR fan, you know a pit stop as a place where cars go to change tires, repair mechanics or sometimes even change drivers; all of which are necessary for optimum performance.

Wikipedia can give you way more strategic analogies than my life experience may have found. We’ve all be there. We’ve all gone through things that don’t seem to make sense. Our mechanics may have needed repairing, the tread on our tires may be been a little worn and the standard crowbar may not have been enough to get our hubcaps replaced. But, afterall, life is just a journey of pit stops that we are moving through to refuel for the next part of the drive!  Live your journey BIG!