Audio version coming soon (I wrote this late).
Names are funny things. You can grow so used to them that you stop hearing them for what they are and just associate them with who or what they represent.
For instance, my middle name, Tadhg, is representative of my Irish heritage. I’m a quarter Irish on my mother’s side, and until today, it’s only ever come up as an interesting tidbit, and a “guess how you spell it” party game. (It’s pronounced like “tiger” without the r, by the way.) But today, when discussing it with a friend, she said, “I wonder what that means?”
Well, according to my dad, they picked Tadhg because it was listed as an Irish version of Timothy, which as it turns out isn’t strictly true but Wikipedia was harder to come by in the nineties. Anyway, they liked Timothy, they wanted Irish heritage in my name, bish bash bosh there’s your birth ceritifcate.
Only… looking into it now, the deeper meaning behind the name Tadhg is actually “poet, philosopher, or story-teller.”
In other words, I’ve been a writer for my entire life, and I’m just now learning that story telling is my literal middle name. That’s some prophecy shit right there!
In all seriousness, this discovery does hold a fairly special meaning to me. I know that naming me my future profession was more of a cosmic coincidence than anything, but all the same, it makes me feel that bit closer to my mum. I started writing early enough in life that she got to see my spark for it, and given that Tadhg is an homage to her side of the family and that my love for her and my nan is what inspires me to keep creating, this all feels like a poetically inspired gift from fate.
How’s that for a hug from beyond?
Perpetually Perturbed 