My lovelies, I want to hear the wonderful stories of how your name came to you.

@Willow (using my alt account because i'm still very much in the closet): mine wasn't really chosen. I signed up for a videogame beta (the online part of URU: Ages beyond Myst) around summer 2003, was rejected because my specs were a bit low. Since I was a HUGE Myst fan I didn't care if it worked like shit, I wanted to see it, so I applied again saying i had more ram, as "my sister" and just wrote the first name that came to my mind, the name from a girl I knew from an IRC channel.

So I kinda found myself after a caffeine trip into a (virtual) desert with Peter Gabriel music playing (he wrote a song for it), a very 90s cliché I guess. Kinda appropiate also that one of the game's taglines during the beta was "a game where you are you" as a play on URU.

I'm currently looking into how to mod something in the game to honor this.

It's a shame it took me until 2019 to understand that creating a separate persona as a girl and basically my entire online identity becoming that persona wasn't a very cis thing to do.

@Willow my first name was what I always knew my name would be “if I were a girl.” my middle names are one that is what my parents would’ve named me if they’d known, and one that every woman in my matriarchal line has as her middle name, so I picked… both! it’s not an amazing story but my names just clicked into place

@nicolexyz @Willow a good choice (I’m not biased)

@Willow I inherited mine from my great-great-great grandmother according to a written account from my great grandmother, she was a strong-willed and independent woman, and I wanted to tap into some of that energy!

I almost went with Tillie, after my badass lesbian great aunt Matilda, but that’s a little too similar-sounding to my sister’s name

@Willow Once upon a time a 9 year old girl found herself wandering in imaginary worlds, and wondered what her name was.
She picked up something long and whimsical, and went by it for a time.
A decade or so later, half of it got dropped, and more streamlined latter half have been used as an online alt every now and then.
Around then she tried to assert herself in the real world, and everything got shattered.
She became a memory, abandoned in a one off world, in a little house floating in a cloudy void with no up or down.
A decade later i started transitioning, so i found her remains and scavenged them for parts.
I picked her name, shortened it some more, added a fresh coat of paint, and here we are.

@Willow So, my naming story is about as bland as they come, but I'll share it. It's a chunk of my deadname.

My name as given at birth was hyphenated because my parents couldn't decide which culture should get to name me, so they went with "both". It was also, as far as I know, globally unique. Not just the entire name, but even just the first name, there was only one in the world, and it was me, since it was two semi-common names from two wildly different cultures stuck together with a hyphen.

One of those names was "Kim". Him is not gender-ambiguous in the way, say, Pat is, where it could be short for either Patrick or Patricia but they're both from the same culture and overlap. It's gender-variant based on culture. In most western English cultures, it's assumed to be feminine. In Korea, it's assumed to be masculine. It's apparently also assumed to be masculine in French Canada. I have never heard of this outside of my family, but I'm assured that it's true. And I guess there's Kim Mitchell as evidence of that.

So, since I was already #####-Kim, I just dropped the ##### and became Kim.

Why? Because I thought it would be a bridge for my parents, and because it allowed me to easily go by Kim in a lot of contexts without having to go through the hassle of changing my legal name right away, since I assumed people would accept it as a short form of my name just the way they had accepted ##### by itself as a short form of my name.

Did that work out? No. If anything, I think it made my parents dig in even harder (because they felt like #####-Kim still included Kim so what was my problem), and places like the post office and so on still hassled me about picking up packages and everything. But by the time I changed my legal name it had stuck, and I went with Kimberly legal, Kim for short.

If I did it over agian, would I choose Kim? Probably not. But I'm kind of too old to change my name twice at this point.

@bright_helpings harold. you could be a harold

@bright_helpings OR A HUMPERDINCK

@inherentlee this HAS been suggested by a good friend of mine!!!

@bright_helpings @inherentlee Herik

@Willow It's right that my name came to me because it's less that I searched it on purpose and more I read it somewhere and it stuck with me. I just stumbled upon it, for a lack of better world

@Willow at the end of grade 8 after our final exams, my friends and I hung out at a park in our neighbourhood that had wooden benches painted a brick red sort of colour. I wanted to vandalize it but the only writing utensil I had that could be seen on that colour was a bright yellow pencil crayon. at the time I wanted to be cool and spell my rather plain birth name in a "unique" way, so I wrote "[that name] was here"—but the writing was so sloppy that my friends couldn't read it and instead thought it said "[half of that name that would give it away]nege wiener".

I went by that nickname for a bit, which was shortened to Nege. I've gone by other names at other times in other places but eventually I tacked -nege onto them as a hat tip to that moment, and that's why I just go by Nege now.

@inherentlee @theynege I do like Henrik, but that is just way too similar a name

@Willow @forestine

She |
He |
| Any
Demand
Of
Word
For
A
Liminal
Self
—

Announce

Characterize

Identify

Name

For
Angry
Little
Stories

@Willow Why does no one believe this is my real name???

@Willow i feel silly sometimes telling about it because it's a character from my favourite game (ness) though the game does actually want you to name them something else when you start it. and if anyone recognizes it, they're a total nerd anyway.

and it also has cryptid vibes, and also my wallet name was scottish and there are a lot of nesses on scotland

@Willow

"Mina" means "girl" or "woman" in Argentina, where I lived for some time.

So, besides being, at least I think so, a lovely name, it is also a statement.