'Culutural Appropriation' in a Name?
Hi, I'm Inari'i (in-arr-ee-aye). I'm deeply furry and have the oddball trait of OC characters visiting my dreams when there's something I'm not consciously confronting.
As you might expect, a furry anthro wolf woman would show up between 25 and 33 years old. She never said anything, but gave off an aura of competence and security. She would sit with me and the next morning I would feel reset well enough to continue. She didn't coddle nor spoke until the last time. The last time she would say "I'm you, don't you get it?" That was my 'oh' moment and it took the form of someone spelling it out for me. Her name was Inari'i. In that spirit I adopted the name when I started HRT.
I'm not an anime follower, nor into most of that stuff. I didn't consciously know "inari" was a Japanese word. Yada yada. A relative whose goal was to rock my confidence threw culutural appropriation into the mix of hurtful wild things to text me out of the blue. I'm not Japanese. But I've already gotten my IRL stuff changed to Inari'i including at work. They've been over-the-top supportive and amazing. No one had even considered that, with most making some positive light of what a mouthful it can be. (I had previously been debating nicknames off it - maybe Nari?)
Now of that known hostile relative's hateful text that's the thing that sticks a bit. Am I going to make someone feel bad as a white girl that has the name Inari'i? Do I publicly reverse course after everyone went ahead and made sure my work email had that name in it and everything? It feels like the biggest time my unconscious stepped up and just lifted me out of the mire and I stepped in it...