To Feel the Sky again...

Sideblog for hoarding posts

[tiercelgreen]

I am on my paws and knees begging folks to realize they don't have to be the world's most amazing writer ever to write! The alterhuman tags have been feeling really devoid and empty of a lot of the usual interesting essays lately and that makes me really sad! I love it when you all write! I love reading about the experiences of people! You also don't have to be interesting to write about yourself. Most people, I find, view themselves to be quite boring and are more fascinated with the lives of others. The reality of this is that you think you're boring because you've lived with yourself/selves your entire life! Of course you're going to seem mundane to yourself. But the secret is, nobody else is you. And no matter how utterly boring you find yourself or your thoughts or your particular relation to the alterhuman community I can assure you, you are interesting to others out there. Your voice DOES matter. Your thoughts and experiences DO have value. You ARE valuable. So please, please write. Please draw. Please share your experiences through literally whatever form you possibly can! I LOVE to read about everyone's unique experiences. Some of my favourite essays and writings out there have been from people who are so entirely and vastly different from myself that I could never have even conceived of the way they viewed things and how they experienced the world around them until I read about their experiences. Some of my favourite artworks are from people who's styles and preferences are wholly different from my own. I promise you, you do not have to be talented or skilled or amazing or perfect to create something of meaning and worth that revolves around your experience. Whether that be a handful of sentences attempting to verbalize a way you felt during a shift, or a several thousand word essay on your particular experience as a spiritual therian. Whether that be a simple pen scribble or a 16+ hour finished piece of work. Whatever it may be. It has meaning because you made it with your own digits with your own hands with your own claws and its yours. Please write.

[punkitt-is-here]

I love it when someone's therian for a fictional animal

[punkitt-is-here]

a guy just made that up and you get to be them? truly the world is full of wonderful experiences. sometimes those experiences are being a dragon, which owns

[wandering-star-sailor]

I may not be a Sapiens but boy am I Homo

[secretpursuerblog]

hhmmmhnhbm. can someone else who gets phantom limbs please explain exactly how they get it? like do you guys COMPLETELY feel them all the time? I’m kinda new to this but whenever walking around I keep having the sensation of my tail behind me but. more mentally than actually feeling it? it’s like I know it’s there but I can’t completely feel it. then usually when sitting it’s just. gone. (to be fair, if I had my tail while sitting it would be crushed and very uncomfortable… that thing is like my whole physical body weight/length.)

[raptorish]

Hey there! Nonhuman phantom limbs are different for everyone - my limbs aren't the same as yours! - but I can say that your experience is very common. It's normal to have phantom limbs that waver in intensity and disappear on you. Having them 24/7 or feeling them as strongly as a solid body part are in no way required. You feel the concept of a tail sometimes? Congrats, that's still a phantom tail!

As someone who doesn't get phantom limbs by default, but can choose to conjure them up - think of phantom shifts like your mind's best guess of where your body parts are.

Your tail isn't physically attached to your spine, not in the way that your legs are attached to your hips, so your brain doesn't have the same amount of practice with knowing where it is. It's had many years of knowing exactly where your legs are in space from seeing, touching and moving with them - it's had far less time to figure out where your tail is, and knowing exactly where it is gets harder when you can't directly see, touch, or move with it!

If you want to make it feel more present, that is a skill you can improve! In my experience, it's a lot like a body scan meditation - you're bringing your attention to a part of your body and increasing your awareness of it.

I can't physically sense my wings to give my mind an anchor, so I practice picturing them attached to me in my mind's eye, in as much detail and as many senses as I want. I focus on how my feathers may look as they glide over each other, how they'd feel brushing up against my skin, the weight of them, the sense of where my wings are in space in relation to the rest of my body, the soft sound of my feathers ruffling, my own familiar scent. Focusing on it can help my brain feel its presence easier, and the practicing builds on itself over time.

[thetadelta]

Seconding what raptorish said! What you're describing is a very typical phantom limb experience, the sensations are generally felt more in someone's mind since they aren't coming from a physical body part, and limbs sort of disappearing when they're in conflict with an object is common :)

As someone who has phantom limbs 24/7– my ears, tail, and wings are part of my body, but in the same way I'm not always consciously aware of my physical limbs I'm not always consciously aware of my phantom ones, either, and they fluctuate in intensity (that is, in how "real" they feel). Sometimes I just have a faint suggestion of movement when my ears swivel or my tail swishes, and sometimes they might as well be physically present because they have weight and I can feel everything they're touching (which can get uncomfortable in chairs and stuff). Usually it's somewhere in between leaning toward the latter, but that's just me and it's different for every person. No matter how subtle or intense it is or where/how you feel it, if you feel the presence of body parts that aren't physically there it "counts" as a phantom body part!

[permanenteclipse]

I feel like the online alterhuman community is not immune to rose-colored nostalgia glasses about the state of things in the Good Old Days when alterhumans were Serious and Philosophical. "Nobody takes it seriously anymore" surely has been the case since like 2005 at least

[lizardywizard]

Exaaaactly.

Also people were complaining about Kids Having Fun back in 2005, and it made for joyless spaces back then too. And racist ones, since a knock-on effect was that people who didn't use "correct English" couldn't participate.

I'm not eager to go back to the old days. Neocities is there if you need it, and with much better tagging and search functions than we had back then. You can do what you like in your own spaces! But the community is larger than that now, and a small group of tastemakers no longer own it.

If I were to be uncharitable, I'd say that's what some people are missing.

[creatureheart]

[ID: Screenshot of tags from who-is-page.

Tags read: “#we gotta be real squad the silliness we see now just feels more prevelant because of 1) microblogging platforms #and 2) we're more well known as a community-- which means more kids inevitably in our spaces by default. #and 3) a lot of joins from the furry community (which is a fandom space and has a much sillier culture overall #causing a bit of a culture shift towards art and play. but not in a bad way!! #anyways let ppl have fun it's fine the philosophical spaces are still out there. or turn ur blog into one. follow ur heart #sorry I'm so high but I hope this made sense”

End ID]

[frameacloud]

“There are no ‘elders’ or leaders [of the otherkin community]. Just because someone has a website, has written a few essays, is an admin or a moderator, or has had more ‘experience’ than you, it does not necessarily make them any more qualified than you to say something or any more worthy of respect. There is no arbiter of the truth here and there is no one who should be given special treatment.”

-Excerpt from “Advice for those new to Otherkin,” an article written by Mikh’to in 2014

[vagabond-beast]

While I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, I would like to clarify that you should still at least hear those who are older in the community. They've gone through a lot, have lots of experiences to share, and sometimes hearing those experiences can help you through your own.

The young can learn from the old and the old can also learn from the young.

[who-is-page]

A young alterhuman does not owe an older alterhuman their ear.

Older alterhumans have just as much (if not sometimes more) capacity to be as biased and misinformed as any alterhuman younger than them. Age does not make wisdom, age does not dictate how worthwhile someone is to listen to.

It is worthwhile to approach someone who has more knowledge in a specific field, discipline, or craft than you and ask them for advice on that specific topic, but that's circumstantially based on what someone has actually done, not age. In this same way, age also does not make knowledge.

So, no. Age has no merit innate in itself. Listen to others based on their actions and if they've proven themself to be trustworthy and accurate, not how many times they've been around the sun.

[frameacloud]

All of us in the otherkin communities are equal peers. Any of us can listen to, criticize, view with skepticism, or ignore any other of us, according to each of our own personal choices. You, me, any of us. And that's good. Each of us creatures came together in this community because of something in common that we already had before each of us met each other, not because we're looking for gurus telling us what to do, think, or believe. That's a healthy safeguard against cultishness. For this reason, it's a red flag for anyone to proclaim themselves a leader of our communities, whether they get an exaggerated sense of importance about running a chatroom, or whether they give themselves titles such as elder, king, princess, alpha, or graymuzzle. That can be a warning sign that they expect to be treated differently than others in a way that they cannot deserve here.

[dovewithscales]

It's important to be open to, and to seek out knowledge and understanding and a broadening of perspective. In general.

It is also important to practice discernment and critical thinking. To subject all sources to the same rigors of determination as to whether or not the source is reliable.

All the more so if the source is pressuring you to think of them as an authority.

[zanthedragon]

To anyone who thinks they might be losing a therio/kintype because its not fun anymore, think about your average human person. They aren't overjoyed to be human. That isn't something they even think about. You might have just gotten over the initial novelty of the experience, but that doesn't mean the experience isn't still with you. Try connecting more to the things you CAN feel, good or bad.

This is directed towards younger therians/otherkin mostly, but could be for everyone

[aestherians]

They were handing out therian zines at the pride parade!!!!!

I can't explain to you how insane it is to have from no Danish therian community to seeing therian teens at every event where weirdness is welcome

[hawksfirefox-blog]

me: *sees pic of kin*

me: ah yes I love myself

me: *looks in mirror*

me: no, no, not that one

[birdbutchcloaca]

you know the more i've interacted with therian online the less i actually care about. the actual label. draconic communities had it right its like. a fucking spectrum from guy who is very into their fursona to actively trying to find a way to species transition and i think making false walls between them reduces the richness of being speciesweird

[im-not-o-fuckin-k-blog]

Humans can't reblog this

[cosmicstrays]

[cosmicstrays]

self reblogging cuz i added image ID and also im already seeing all the hashtag NotAllMisanthropes mfs crawling out the woodwork

[spacebughugs]

dragoncuddling you!!

dragoncuddling you!!

dragoncuddling you!!

dragoncuddling you!!

dragoncuddling you!!

dragoncuddling you!!

[the-future-is-chrome]

google searcg how long does it take for hrt to give me a dragon tail and wings and horns and

[kitten-of-bast]

Maybe I'm mistaken but it feels like these days in the tumblr therian community its much more common to be 0% human.

Feel like a bit of an outsider now. Somecreature posted a more poetic version of this sentiment a few days ago: something like too beastly to be human, too human to be beast.

[thetadelta]

Teenage therianthropy in the 2000's

Just reminiscing a bit. TL;DR: I love you modern teenage therians & otherkin, and also if anyone was on Chicken Smoothie circa 2008-2012 please say hi!

When I first stumbled upon therianthropy back in 2006, I quickly realized that there wasn't a place for me in the communities whose essays and information I was excitedly reading. It had been so freeing and exhilarating to know that I wasn't alone in how I am, but all the therian forums were for adults, and I was a teenager. I probably could have joined the "adult" forums and talked to grown-up animals instead of just lurking, but I didn't feel comfortable talking to strange adults (this was back when we actually taught kids to not disclose personal info online!), and the people on therian forums didn't feel like my peers anyway. So many of their conversations just sounded like dry philosophy, or referenced "adult" things I didn't relate to. I resigned myself to just reading what people wrote, and being a lonely teenager with nobody to talk to.

My first time really talking to other nonhumans was on the forum for a digital pet website called Chicken Smoothie. It was barely even a browser game at the time, just a cozy little forum with a pet adoption feature, and the users were a few hundred teens and preteens chatting and making art. But, in probably late 2008 or early 2009, someone started an otherkin thread and I finally found my peers. We spent hours a day swapping information we'd read, figuring out what people were, and just having fun. There was no gatekeeping or unfriendly grilling or essay-writing, and no sanctimonious adults to tell us we weren't being "serious" enough about nonhumanity. We were serious, but in the way kids are serious, before society makes them afraid to be authentic and silly. Conversations about spirituality and phantom shifts were interspersed with people roleplaying and making animal sounds, and we enjoyed both just as much. It was a space for all of us to act openly nonhuman around other people for the first time, and we did it like teenagers. We chatted through text and made art for each other because that's all the Internet really was at the time, but if had been possible (and socially acceptable) to take and share photos and videos of us acting like ourselves we would absolutely have been doing that, too. I can't even begin to imagine how much fun we'd have had with access to modern social media, when just talking to each other about who we were was already so fulfilling.

I don't know how many of the people I was friends with still call themselves therians, otherkin, or vampires. It's likely some of them were just roleplaying and left those things in the past. But I'm still here over 15 years later, so I know I was far from the only one genuinely expressing who I was. It doesn't matter to me whether those people I was a nonhuman kid with "grew out of it" or not, because that sense of joy and community was real. There wasn't a space for nonhuman teens online, so we carved one out ourselves.

Modern teens don't have to search so hard to find their community. When I look at the therian and otherkin tags on tumblr today, and when I see videos of teens on tiktok wearing homemade masks and running in the grass, what I see is a bunch of young people doing the exact same things I was doing on a forum in 2009. The infrastructure of the internet has made it hard to find and share accurate information the way we used to so there's a lot more misinformation, but the joy of teenagers learning they're not alone is still the same. There are so many high schoolers out there talking about shifts and posting silly animal sounds the same way I did, and that makes me really happy.

Maybe some of them are roleplaying and will stop calling themselves therians or otherkin in a few years, but that doesn't actually matter. There are people out there exploring nonhumanity for the very first time, and the joy is real.

[thetadelta]

Thinking about this also makes me sad for teens living in the social media era of the internet, because most online spaces don't have edges like they used to. Sure, you can make up a new tag or something, but you're still posting on websites used by millions of people for thousands of things. It's not private, you're always being watched by someone. You don't get to just act like teenagers together without the chance of adults swooping in and calling you immature or making fun of the way you talk.

I'm sure it's why there's such a division between teen and adult nonhumans nowadays, because on social media we're all trying to live in the same house when some of us have different wants and needs for a community space. If the adults on Werelist had seen posts from the Chicken Smoothie otherkin community on their boards I'm sure they would've felt really irritated that we weren't being "serious" enough, and if we'd had to deal with stuffy adults posting in ours we'd have started to dislike them back. I'm glad Discord has provided some respite from that, but chatrooms have their own host of issues that are a lot harder to deal with than a forum because they're so closed-off and conversations happen a lot faster.

Maybe someday we'll see the return of forums as a popular online social venue. I sure hope so.

[aestherians]

I dreamed our community was actually somewhat hierarchical and we had a rank above greymuzzle, which was called "grandkin," and it was anyone over the age of 80

[tanix-dragon]