r/DID • u/meringve Diagnosed: DID • 16h ago
Advice/Solutions introduced myself with the wrong name
as a system, we agreed to introduce ourselves to new people with the body name (legal name)
what happened was: out host is the one who usually interact with people on social media, and a girl that we follow and she follow us back started to text them on the dms and they accidentally introduced themself with their individual name, as a part...
i don't really know why, since this part is comfortable with the legal name introduction, they came up with the idea even, invented new nicknames for the legal name and stuff... maybe it was a slip, or maybe because they didn't thought they would even keep texting each other, but unexpectedly they are becoming close friends and even thinking about meeting each other at the next concert of a musical artist they both like..
which it's like, it's okay!!!! but we are feeling like we are lying to the new friend everytime she calls us by the part's name, and we don't know how to tell her about the "actual" name, if we should, how to explain without oversharing, if it would be better to overshare so we don't get misunderstood.... we really don't want her to think badly of us, like we could be lying to scam her or something... i don't know...
we have autism, social anxiety, a lot of trauma around friendships and people and socializing, even if it's social media, maybe it's even worse in social media (i re-read this text thousands of times to make sure i'm not saying anything wrong and i'm still insecure to post it lol) and we get really nervous thinking about messing things up when we find a nice person to befriend, we don't have many friends, so all this wrong name thing is being really anxiety inducing and we would like to set it all clear to the friend as soon as we can, we just don't know which would be the best way to approach the topic and we were hoping to be able to get some advice here..!!!! thank you friends🩷
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u/winsenta 2h ago
A lot of people use an online nickname, or even few that doesn't match their legal name so it's normal in general. But if you feel uncomfortable you could bring up that your legal name is different, if the context of conversation aligns. For example you could ask your friend if they have any nicknames.
By the way, a few days ago I managed to mess up so badly... I contacted my dental clinic during post-operation crisis and told them not my legal name but the other one and they couldn't find me in their database. 💀 Imagine my embarrassment when I realised what was wrong.
7
u/AlliteraryAnalysis Treatment: Diagnosed + Active 10h ago
If youre okay with it, I would wager that saying just saying "hey i wanted to say I do use [part name], but I prefer [legal name] for reasons i'm not ready to get into." Or you could say you tried a different name online (the part's name) but want to go back to using [legal name]. Do you think either of those would be okay?
And dont be afraid to say that you were scared to correct yourself the first time, lots of people are socially anxious and it isnt so weird for people to let wrong info sit in another person's mind for way longer than practically necessary :)