When I decided I needed a name, I started by going to a site with a whole bunch of names. I filtered for names of someone with my gender, born in the year I was born. Then I went through that entire list, noting down the names that weren't obviously unworkable. Common flaws that led to names not making this list: too long, already taken by someone I know, demographic mismatch, spelling unclear from pronunciation or vice versa, sounding terrible, and sounding too much like a feminization of a more common male name. Here are the 34 names that weren't immediately ruled out:
Next, I looked at the names that made that list, and ruled out the ones that I actually didn't like as much as I'd thought at first, or that just weren't good fits for me. Turns out that was most of them, so I went down to these 11:
So, then I started thinking carefully about these names. Some, on reflection, were already taken by people in my social circle. Others, like Rose, had fictional resonances I didn't want to take on. The five that still didn't have obvious flaws:
That brought it down to few enough names that I could just consider them all simultaneously. This revealed that Diane was the one I liked the most, so I named myself: