What's In A Name?

It’s a fair question, and the answer is simple enough on the surface: it’s my middle name. It was given to me. I didn’t choose it the way some people choose a new name, trawling baby name websites, trying things on for size, discarding dozens of candidates before something finally clicks. Halley was already there, sitting quietly in the middle of my full name where almost nobody thought to look.

The name comes from Halley’s Comet. Edmund Halley, the astronomer who first calculated its periodic orbit and understood that the comet people had been watching in terror and wonder for centuries was the same one, returning. The comet itself appears roughly every 75 years, once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. Unmistakable when it comes. Impossible to ignore.

I like that. I’ve always liked that.

I started going by Halley in 2021. Not with any great ceremony. There was no announcement, no moment of declaration. It began in the places where I had the most agency over how I was known, and spread outward from there. Gradually the people around me adjusted, and the name settled into use the way a good name should: naturally, without resistance, as if it had always been waiting to be used properly.

The reason I chose it, beyond it already being mine, is that it’s androgynous. That mattered to me. It still does. A name that doesn’t declare a gender before you’ve had the chance to introduce yourself is a small but significant thing. It gives you room. It lets you arrive as yourself before anyone has decided who you are.

There’s something I find quietly meaningful about the fact that I didn’t have to invent a new name. That the right one had been there all along, given to me at birth by parents who couldn’t have known what they were doing, sitting in the middle of my name like a truth in parentheses.