I am going to go back to my journey. I feel like y’all need to see how things have developed for me along the way. Having a three syllable name can be a mouth full for people to keep saying as a pronoun in a conversation about me. So slowly my pronoun developed into to the first three letters of my name. This didn’t bother me because my nephew has called me “Mer” since I moved to Illinois.
The way that this happened was someone at my church asked me if it was ok for them to call me “Mer”. Of course I said yes, since my nephew already used it. So as time went along others in my church family started using this for my name and so it developed into my gender pronoun. This made me feel good. It not only helped people to use a pronoun that helps me feel like a person instead of make me feel uncomfortable every time I hear she or her.
I never thought that others would help me find a pronoun other than my full name to make me feel comfortable in my own skin. Because, if you remember my first couple of blogs where I talked about the anxiety that I had about finding a pronoun that fit and how people felt that I couldn’t use my name as my gender pronoun. So when people helped me in this journey it made me realize that people really wanted me to feel good about myself. The fact that they asked if it was ok before just doing it was on of the things that made this feel right. I don’t know how I would have felt about people just starting to do this with out asking me. It might not have bothered me since my nephew and sister in law already called me “Mer”. I’m glad that they asked because this shows me they care and understand how using non-binary pronouns when referring to me is important to my identity.