We Are Cinderella!

Hi all! Today, I discovered Throwback Thursday. Well, I had heard of it before, but always assumed it was an image-based blog hop, as this is what the term usually means. Not so in this case. Lauren and Maggie’s Throwback Thursday allows us to write a post taking a stroll down memory lane. I’m pretty sure photos are allowed, but the main focus seems on writing. Today’s topic is nicknames.

I have had many nicknames throughout my life. Some are derived from my name. For example, many people simply abbreviate “Astrid” to “As” and my husband and his family then add the commonly-Dutch “-ie” suffix for “little”, so my nickname becomes “Assie”. My husband and his two sisters all have -ie nicknames, with my husband Jeroen’s nickname, “Joenie”, being the most related to his actual name.

Then there are these nicknames that are based on some letters out of my name but not many. An example is the Dutch word “asbak” (which translates to “ashtray)”. I hate that nickname with a vengeance.

Another one is “Assepoester”. This is the Dutch name for Cinderella in the fairytale. I don’t like the Dutch nickname, but I for one do relate to Cinderella, particularly to the feeling of having to be transformed by a fairy (ie. put on a mask) in order to be acceptable as I am.

For this reason, I sometimes still use Cinderella as my nickname. That is, I do so when referring to myself and my multiple alter personalities (dissociative identities) as a system. Usually, I refer to the collective as Astridetal, as in my blog’s URL, but at one point we felt somehow like we needed a collective name that didn’t claim that Astrid was the “owner” of everyone else. So Cinderella System was born!

Did or do you have any interesting nicknames?