Names really are a very interesting topic.
Though I tend to go by Meredith much of the time, there's nothing fixed or legal about it - it's just what I've always been called when people don't want to use my birth name.
It's interesting to think about how we choose a name. It's not like names come with a meaning attached to them, but at the same time, names do have a usage history. So, when someone says, "hey, Meredith," I may assume, (because that name has often been used to refer to me,) that the person wants to talk to me.
So, names serve a function, but that function is a property of the things, people and events in a situation. Which is to say, within a given culture, (which can be thought of as 'a way of organising our experience of the world',) we take part in various contexts of situation - each organised around our cultural ideation - and when a name is evoked, what is evoked must be understood in relation to all the situational elements as they are organised from within the world view of a culture. (One thing to remember is that cultures are not just nationalities or language groups, but that cultures exist within smaller groups as well - sports clubs; families; online forums; offline friendships...)
The significant thing to note, therefore, is that the act of choosing to be called something other than what people would otherwise call you, is nothing more, or less, than an act of dissociating oneself from those cultures that would call you by your birth name. And, by extension, a complete dissociation from ways of organising experience that no longer appear to apply to our own perceived experience of the world.
Perhaps the best advice could be that, just as it takes time to transition the physical attributes of our perceived identity, so also we should take time to transition out of our old persona and into the new.
