I’d like to say my name connects to my roots. I wish it meant beautiful or precious in my native language or something. I’d also like to have a native language.

Essentially, my name is from a nineteen year old girl in love. Realistically, I’m named after a comic book artist, Jae Lee. My dad was going to college to be a comic book artist, and my mom was paying for it, in more ways than one. Long story short, he played her like a deck of cards. He played me too.

My name is very versatile. It can be pronounced JAElee or JaeLEE. It can sound urgent like “Jaelee what’s wrong?” or soft like “Jaelee everything’s gonna be okay”. Or with the middle name on the end like “Jaelee Ann get your butt out of the street”.

My name doesn’t mean anything on babynames.com. But, like most of the things about myself, I had to make up my own meaning. So here goes. Jaelee means artist, and student and sister and daughter and ex-daughter and cat lover and button collector and book reader and French speaker and world traveler. What does it mean to you?