-
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.