Why is it called Chameleon Journal?

You might've noticed that the website and my social media profiles are all called something along the lines of 'chameleon journal'. I thought I'd explain why I picked this name, instead of going with my own name or along the lines of 'PetraSEO', or something similar.

First of all, while I consider myself an SEO at heart, I'm also many other things. I currently work as a Solution Engineer, which is a PreSales function in SaaS. I'm also a yogi and a traveller. So I always wanted to find something that best describes who I am, rather than what I do. So instead of using my own name, which often gets mispronounced, I continuously opted to pick this more abstract name for my personal accounts and projects. And as I started to use it more often, it also started to develop a deeper meaning for me and became more of an idea of who I am.

The actual name 'chameleon journal' is close to my heart. When I moved to the UK in 2014, I had to leave behind everything I knew before and start completely over. Friends, family, my career, my cat, my native language. I wasn't completely alone when I arrived but it was still a very lonely life to start with. My friends got me a chameleon plushie and as childish as it is, that plushie represented some of home to me. I started taking Pascal, the chameleon with me everywhere I went and travelled. It became a thing, so when I signed up to Instagram, I started with an account that was the first Chameleon Journal, showing off the places I travelled to with my chameleon.

But there are some other meanings to this name as well. I always found chameleons to be fascinating creatures. The one thing pretty much everyone knows about chameleons is that they can change their skin colour in reaction to their environment. But a less known fact is that they also change their colour to communicate their mood. A neutral green chameleon would blend into their environment, while an excited or submissive chameleon can display a variety of different colours. Anyone, who experienced a big change in their life that includes breaking out of a usual cadence or environment - like moving to a new country, breaking up a long-term relationship, leaving behind a job and changing careers, and so on - would be familiar with what I call 'the chameleon lifestyle'. We learn, we adapt, and we change.

When you change your environment completely , you have to react to that change and it helps you explore completely new aspects of yourself.

See, I feel like we're all chameleons, learning to show our colours, and with every change and every new environment, we discover more and more of our personality. I think what's beautiful about this, is that we don't have to think of ourselves as one thing. We are complex, colourful human beings who grow and develop with change.

So Chameleon Journal is my personal experience of the world. It's inconsistent, ever-changing, ever-moving, and always honest, showing true colours.