Prompt: Facebook asked about a situation in which someone had identified a name that felt like the person they were becoming, but were not quite yet. There was fear over legal name changes, social name changes, their permanence, the general insecurity around changing the external label of your personhood.
There was a name - Adriaan - that immediately came to mind the first time I put myself in drag makeup. He did not feel like a person I could be "full-time" for about a year after that first experience. It's like I knew very concretely who that person that was - it was something of a revelation, tbh - but it didn't feel real yet. At that point, I still felt like Marie, this identity I'd constructed very painstakingly/intentionally as my assigned gender. But after a month or two I just couldn't stay away from this thing I'd found and came out as genderqueer. I used a different name, Emory, for the first (very fluid) 9-ish months after that, but it didn't stick, plus I was becoming more and more like the "Adriaan" I'd seen in the mirror. And then one day things kind of just clicked into place and I'd grown out of Marie. I have no doubt in my mind that this is the right name for me, now - it clicks so well. I'll have used this name for a year come May.
I'd definitely recommend that you try it out for a few months or a year, use it as though it were your only name (except for legal stuff, of course), and see if it fits. But it's really tricky to project this vision of Future You, this person you dream of becoming, onto the proto-Future You person you still are. Just let yourself become. You'll likely decide about names as a product of that process.
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