A lark by any other name

My name is Lark Aster. At least that's the name I go by in Lark Space. It's also what most of my friends call me. But I actually have a few other chosen names that I use in different contexts:

  • I have a name that my origin family, my coworkers, and the government call me. I'll call this my "government name".
  • I have a name that my polycule calls me.
  • I have a few other names that I use with specific people. In some cases more than one per person, if one of them is used specifically in a D/s capacity. I often call these "intimate names".

I often think of my names as existing on a spectrum from most public to most private:

  1. The name the government calls me
  2. The name my friends call me
  3. The name my polycule calls me
  4. The names only specific people call me

If you think of the people, communities, and institutions in my life as existing in a series of concentric circles around me--where the innermost circle represents my most intimate relationships and the outermost circle represents the public at large--my names represent the boundaries between those rings.

Not all the people in my life know all my names! Generally, people closer to the center will know my more public names, but I'm more selective about sharing more private names with people farther out. For example, my coworkers don't know that my friends call me Lark, and I rarely share intimate names with other people.

Fake names, True names, old names, new names

Communications platforms will generally ask you to choose the name you appear as to others, and in most cases, will let you choose whatever name you want. This presents a challenge: deciding which name to use on a given platform.

On Telegram, using Lark was an easy choice. I use Telegram almost exclusively for chatting with furry friends, who all know me as Lark.

On Signal, for a long time, I used my government name. Unlike Telegram, I don't associate Signal with any particular community or friend group. I just have a handful of contacts from various contexts who happen to be easiest to reach on Signal. I figured that if I had to choose a single name, it might as well be my government name, since that's what most people think of as their "canonical" name.

But then I started connecting with new folks over Signal--joining various group chats for groups and events in my local area. I would go to these events and introduce myself as Lark, because that's what felt most appropriate. But I would then have to explain that my name is different on Signal.

On many platforms, this is common. People have handles they use in online spaces, and "real" names they use in-person. But online handles follow wildly different conventions from IRL names; you wouldn't commonly expect to find numbers in an IRL name, for example. You can generally infer if a name is an online handle, and assume that that person has a different name they go by in IRL contexts. My government name, while maybe somewhat uncommon, does pretty unambiguously pass as a "real" name, so people who see it on Signal will not tend to expect that I will introduce myself differently in person.

Eventually I grew tired and decided that if most people who I talk to on Signal know me as Lark, it may as well be my Signal name. But this feels like a betrayal of the public/private partition that Lark represents for me. It felt especially weird when my grandmother texted me on Signal to ask who Lark is[1].

Deconstructing the canonical name paradigm

Discord actually solves this problem for me quite well. The way it handles names is pretty flexible:

  • You choose a single "user profile" name that everyone sees by default.
  • You have the option of choosing a separate name (and pronouns!) for each server[2] you join.
  • Your friends can set a "friend nickname" for you, which is the name you appear to them as in DMs and group chats.

Here's how I use it:

  • My user profile name is a handle--not one of my "real" names. This means that anyone I interact with on the platform only has the names I choose to give them.
  • I choose a name for each server that I'm a member of, depending on which I think is most appropriate.
  • People who know me by a particular name can set that as my friend nickname.

Discord is my primary chat platform; it's how I talk to most of my friends. I'm not thrilled with how invested I am in the platform given that it's not open-source or end-to-end encrypted, but I do appreciate that it doesn't shoehorn me into choosing a single "canonical" name, and I wish other platforms would follow suit.

  1. It was actually a very sweet interaction; I explained that most of my friends call me Lark, but I still prefer [government name] with her, and she told me that she's happy to call me whatever I want. Genuinely a top-tier ally. ↩

  2. If you're not familiar with Discord, a "server" is analogous to a Slack workspace or a Matrix space; it's a collection of text and voice channels with a membership and permissions system. Different communities you engage with on Discord will generally each have their own server. ↩