Something interesting I've recently conceptualized about my certain flavor of gender fluidity is that, despite nothing feeling like it represents me particularly well, my birthname isn't quite a deadname to me.
The thing about being a greedy little gender ball whose preferrable base form would be a cute amorphous slime ball with vaguely feminine feature, but with the ability to shapeshift to anything on a spectrum between my personal idealized form of masculinity and my personal idealized form of femininity is that it's built on a central desire of autonomous freedom. And despite the form I'd wish to take often being decided by whims I barely feel the need to have an in depth understanding of, I feel those whims, and I enjoy the freedom to be able to follow them and take the whimsical form that feels right in any given scenario.
All that being said, I dont want to let go of anything, because I want to be able to be anything, and that includes my birthname. It is the one form I didn't choose, and it's truthfully the form that feels the least like me, but I am lucky enough to have a good realtionship with not just my parents but my family and lineage, and can view it as a gift from them where so many others understandably see it as a curse or weight. In a way, its just a form of my favored hobby of collecting nicknames. I've gone by many names over the years in many different relationships: Xan, Gil, Xoas, York, River, Teeby, Abbs, Sixes, Mabu, Dashi, just to name a few, and each of them was earned, gifted, and felt representative of nuanced forms I take, representations of certain areas within my spectrum. And while i wasnt whole enough to earn my birthname, it was still gifted, a representation of my origin and of incalculable events that made my family and lineage and led to me existing in the first place. I by no means owe my family anything for that, life can be a gift and a curse and I had no say in the matter, but because I happen to respect my family, respect my history, i keep it around.
It also acts as a perfect representation for strangers and people who have not gotten close enough to know me to any meaningful effect. For people who only know as much about me as my disconnected origin form would show them, for whom I dont have the veil of the internet to allow me a comfortable amorphous and moldable existence, this relic of a history I am not yet I share is the perfect answer. It is not false, it is simply aggressively vague: like if someone asks for your thoughts on your favorite media and you answer "I think it's good" because you havent the rapport with this person to rant for the next six hours. My nicknames are each their own six hour conversations, but my given name still means I am good.
