Your Good Name, Please?

Names are chosen with meaning.

In many cultures, they carry a hope, sometimes a blessing, or a quiet desire. A word that is spoken over and over across a lifetime.

A name is one of the first things we are given, and one of the few things that stays with us in a very particular way. It is called out in different moments, in different tones. Over time, it becomes part of how we are known and how we begin to know ourselves.

I have often noticed how a name begins to feel like the very essence of the person who carries it.

My own story with names has never been just one name.

I was first named Meera, after a devotee my mother deeply admired. Somewhere along the way, she was told that Meera’s life was marked by hardship and longing.

So when I was still very young, she chose another name for me. Mridula.

That became my name in school, in records, in the world outside. It carries a different meaning—soft, gentle. And yet, the first name never left me.

At home, I was still called Meera. The name had already become part of me and my journey.

And sometimes, there were other names too.

My mother would call me “little blue bird” when I wore a blue dress, or add a soft, affectionate twist to my name in ways that only she did.

Those names were never written anywhere.
They were never meant for the outside world.

And yet, they are the ones that return with the strongest sense of love and remembrance.

They bring back a certain kind of comfort, a memory of being seen with love, without needing to be anything in particular.

Both names came with me. And over time, I began to see how they lived alongside each other.

The gentleness that Mridula holds.
The depth and intensity that I associate with Meera.

Not as opposites, but as parts of the same life.

At some point, I changed the spelling to Mira. It felt like a quiet way of making the name my own, of shaping what it meant for me now.

Looking back, it feels less like one name replacing another and more like a conversation that continued.

A name is given. A meaning is suggested.
And then, slowly, a life is lived into it.

You begin to wonder whether the name shapes the person, or the person grows into the meaning of the name.

Perhaps it is both.

What we are called, what we respond to, what is repeated over time—it settles somewhere within us.

And gently, almost without noticing, it begins to take form in who we become.