How did you choose your name?

[saoirse.t-e-c]

I chose my own name after fusing about 18 years ago. I researched baby names and their meaning for some time – I wanted something I could connect to on a deep level. We’re half Irish-American, so we looked at Irish names, amongst others. My name means “freedom”, which has different layers of meaning for me.

For Janet, who chose her name around 28 years ago, it wasn’t so much the meaning, as that the initials and number of letters in our new name matched those of our birth name. I have no idea why that was important, but hey, each to their own.

In some cases, alters were just born with their names. In other cases, members of the system came up with a nickname, and it stuck. For instance, one of our child alters is named “Tso”. That stands for “The Silent One”, because she’s non-verbal. She’s young enough she also doesn’t read or write, so she couldn’t really tell us her name. AFAIK, she’s happy with Tso.

[TraumatisedUnicorn]

I know a few of us have gone down the researching baby-names route. I’m not sure who I am right now to be honest, but I know that Emma got her name accidentally. A person who was hard of hearing misheard our birth name as Emma (somehow, that’s not even close to our birth name) and she decided to stick with.

“Unicorn” named Shelly after a toy wooden snail she had when she was too young to know that some names are traditionally considered to be masculine or feminine, so we say Shelly is short for Sheldon since he’s male.

Nyx is a fusion of two alters and wanted a name with a “Y” and an “X” in to honour his predecessors, he came across the name in a game we used to play called “Nyx Quest” and looked up the meaning of it. Nyx was the greek Goddess of the night and lived in a house with her twin sister Hemera, Day, but they could only ever meet as they were passing each other, they could not both be there at the same time (I might be remembering the details of the story wrong, I don’t think I’m the one who read it, but it seemed fitting for DID and we have a house in our inner world too.) He liked the meaning behind it.

Chameleon came with their name and chose to shorten it to Cammi for convenience, Ditto is a shapeshifter and refused to choose a name that wasn’t triggering, so our boyfriend starting referring to him as Ditto coz of the shapeshifting pokemon and it just stuck. Unicorn used to call him, “Nightmare voice” before she knew about the DID as he only communicates through nightmares.

Riven looked up nature-themed baby names as they feel a deep connection with nature, they wanted to go with the name River at first but they were worried that didn’t sound “normal” enough (they’re very self concious about being a non-human alter and they want to blend in) so they changed it to Riven which is an alteration of River and also means “to split”, which fits well.

And “Unicorn” just goes by that, but isn’t happy with that being her name. Any name she chooses just doesn’t feel right and I think she’s given up on ever finding a good fit at this point. We’ve tried looking through English and Italian baby names (we’re half of each) and she just can’t find anything she’s happy with for more than a few months.

It’s interesting how you came up with Tso for “the silent one”, I really like that name. We have a very young alter who can’t read or write either, it makes things really difficult. She’s verbal at least but still really struggles to express herself in ways we can understand. It’s hard coz I know she wants to make friends but she has no way to communicate in online spaces without being able to write. Sorry, off topic.

It’s interesting that Janet wanted parrallels between her name and the birth name. Kind of like Nyx wanting to keep letters in his name from the alters he used from. Freedom is such a powerful meaning behind a name, I love it.

[kingslayer]

Hi! Shadow & Alien here,

We both were sort of “born” with our names. We’re both introjects of music-related things. Shadow’s full name is Shadow Moses (a song that a previous host had an OC based on) and Alien’s is Hesitant Alien (an album that the same host also had an OC based on). The same goes for Tyler and Hannibal. The character they’re sourced from has that name so they kinda just took on that name.

Melody is named Melody because she’s a fictive of Babydoll from Suckerpunch but didn’t want to keep that as her name after going by that for a while and she really identified with the line from a My Chemical Romance song, “I’m not the singer that you wanted, but a dancer.” And she wanted a music-related name and it fit.

Rigby chose his name after going through lists of baby names. For him, it just felt like it fit.

And I think Lizzie is named that because it was similar to the body’s name at one point.

Others kinds just knew or had come to the conclusion of their name before I met them/realized they were there. I should ask them sometime about that.

But yeah, that’s some of the backstories behind our names.

[Aspect]

When I (Alice) first took over as host, I wrote up a list of names I liked and tried writing them out to see how it felt. But I knew from the start that my name is Alice. At this point, we hadn’t discovered we were a system, I just thought I was trans, and didn’t want to change my name without really thinking about it first.

[alonee]

I did it a similar way.. except most of the time I still think I am just trans*, but just… I also know that the same name doesn’t always seem to fit.
So I tried to pick a name for transitioning, but then it felt weird sometimes when people used it for me, because I felt is wasn’t my name..
If you are comfortable to share your experience with me/us: How did you find out it wasn’t just you? (I get that that is such a personal and potentially long story, so no hard feelings ofc. if you don’t)

[The_Chaos_Is_In_Us_]

Okay. This is going to be a **TIME**.

-so we first went by system divergent. the name is self-explanatory.

but we now go by the Chaos_Is_In_Us because the chaos is you (NOT YOU PERSONALLY) and the chaos is also in us like in our headspace, so I hope you enjoy that tidbit about our system !! 🙂

[alonee]

[cn: trans* topics; and cn: I am currently still questioning whether we are.. a system,.. which is why we avoid some common terminology. This is just how names work(ed) for us, so far]

For a long time there were just a bunch of nick-names flowing around for us.

I had to come up with nick-names for my Online Accounts, because at the time people would never share personal info online. So I used a Name that I just really liked the sound of. But at times I really didn’t feel like the side I showed of myself online was who I felt like, so I started to make more Accounts, in order not to be judged by how I “usually” was at that specific online space….

When I noticed that ‘I’ had a lot of “disagreements with ‘myself'” I usually used two different names to refer to these different ‘sides’. So I had, at the time, 2 names I liked, and the assumption, that I was a third ‘perspective’, with a different (my birth) name.

Fast forward a decade and I went to Uni. I noticed how odd it felt for me when people started calling me by my birth name (that was so rarely used before).

I wanted to change my name in order to figure out whether I might be trans* and I actually also tried to change the names I used only for myself.. but it kinda didn’t really work.
But we did agree about
most names to change them to a gender-neutral one, in order to manage dysphoria. Those were anyhow the names that didn’t quite fit to begin with and we are definitely not at the end of our name(s) finding journey.

Currently, for the outside world there are two names: a more “proper” sounding and a more “nickname” sounding one;
One was the only gender-neutral nick name I had when I came out, and so I went by that for a while; the other one was a suggestion from my parent, when I came out to them, as a gender neutral name they could get behind. As a trans* person it is very cool to be able to say that my parent chose my name (again); even though I chose to change it.
Irl, I just react to both of these names when called, but most of the time no name that someone else calls me feels right tbh.

In the end I myself usually just use a name that I feel comfortable with that very moment.

[ConfusedSoup]

For me it was a combo of one of the others trying to name me, and also having a name i didn’t like, but both started with J. so they called me that and i just started writing it as Jay

currently in the pricess of being stuck co-con/possibly fusing with another and were tentatively using Jaye for the blend

The other half of this stuckness is Drake. he’s a dragon so they called him drake, and he loves it ><

Paper chose her name, she felt blank cause she had no memories at all, and she felt moldable like origami. first origami chamber was her name, but she split and is now Paper and Room

[ConfusedSoup]

Paper chose her name, she felt blank cause she had no memories at all, and she felt moldable like origami. first origami chamber was her name, but she split and is now Paper and Room(room did not choose its name, a room is just what it is)

Crow got her name from playing with a toy crow alot(shes a little one and was utterly enamered by the thing)

Calli choose thier name based on a pet caterpillar we had once

Void Ocean had a few ideas and had our partner look over them (ae are outer space)

Uh Resa is short for a name for a stuffed animal that represented her to us in the past when we had no idea what was going on.

Isaac is also named for his stuffed animal representation

Smoke wanted to smoke and mimes smoking when shes close

my brain is getting scrambly, so i can’t remember more, but i think the majority are nicknames based on things they like or that trigger them out.. lotta unofficial names

[Headquarter.sys]

Lets see,

We started with the names A and M for the first two alters that revealed to us, they eventually became Adept, because one holds a lot of our thinking and skills, and M was made to Em, Agonist was named after an album with specific themes related to them, so was Epitaph and Cenotaph was named after a song that is related around our ideas of themes of what they represent to themselves, Parrotfoot was named after a name wed heard somewhere about a thief in south america with heavily arched feet. Kinfolk is a little/middle who identifies as kin/family and folk because theyre a people person. The traveler was named after a gangster/romance movie character from the 20’s. Oney is named that because they are small, and your honey, your Oney. Spike and Deunan are both named after fictional characters from animes, cowboy bebop and appleseed respectively. Mirage was named Mirage because of the way they appear in the mind, theyre a robotic pack mule and when they overheat it turns into a mirage where they disappear the closer you get. Gecko called themselves that because they had an affinity for Geckos since the system was small. Tara was named after the female version of the buddha, (she does not think she is the buddha in case youre wondering) because they are also very genderfluid. And shocktrooper goes by that name because thats how they first appeared to us recently. The rest just chose their own names because they liked the name.