It usually starts as a sinking feeling in my gut. Unconsciously I curl my fingers, digging into the mattress and seeking a certain sensation. If I had the propensity for it, maybe I'd start tearing up, but even after getting on that estrogen/antiandrogen cocktail, it was still highly conditional. Instead I end up burying my face into a soft pillow and nuzzle into it. My body settles into the covers. I'm probably going to be here for a while.
The offending content is half of the time very unassuming at first, but something about it (maybe the detail work in the fur, or the tugging brutality of wicked claws emerging from twitching fingertips), give me pause. I want to reach out—want to be this thing. And then there's this oh-so-familiar blanket of isolation that prevents this feeling from growing out of control and consuming me to hopelessness. I can name them if you haven't figured it out: yearning, desire and envy.
It's really not one of those things I can just put down and forget about. It's something that stuck with me even after entertaining it in every fashion imaginable. When the excuses for intense interest blended between simple intrigue—to artistic appreciation—to something more fetishistic and isolatingly shameful—to a strong feeling that cannot be refuted or lessened from an undeniable discrepancy from humanity.
One doesn't stay feverishly stuck on an idea for well over a decade and pass it off as an idle fancy. Not one like this. Not with how this feels. Not when my heart beats faster everytime I see a depiction of a body contorting in a particular way. Not when words can reduce me to a lump under the covers imagining them in vivid detail as the character of transformative focus is who I become for a small period of time. I'll take this brief release. It's so damn good.
At some point when dealing with strong and affecting emotions, we stumble across different mechanisms for coping with them. In this very particular case of mine, I found it in very active affirmations. As it turns out, if you stretch a muscle, and bend the mind, things can become very convincing.
I feel like this calls for a demonstration, so I invite you to slip into my body for a moment. Let my references to self become references to your own self. Let's begin with the muscles.
Lazily I roll over onto my stomach, eyes squeezed shut as I let my arms extend forward of me. This will be more much comfortable for what's to come, and with a safisfied hum, my wrist rotates downwards into the soft ground. The resistance against this downward push of my hands is the first key stretch, but if we are to get anywhere, I need to feel this stretch go all the way down from my wrists to fingertips. Bending my fingers back at their first knuckles while flexing them forward at their tips to dig into the ground does the trick. Depending on how I'm feeling, I may pull my thumbs as far back as I can, almost as if I was trying to tuck them away into my hands but not quite there yet. I like to let my hands and fingers twitch a bit to help with the sensations. I focus on that lovely stretch, making sure it's just at the edge of hurting but not quite, and it's very pleasant. It can be even better once I get the mind involved.
(Loosen up a bit, suspend your disbelief. The key here is that if you think you're feeling something, you are. Believe it, without a shadow of a doubt. Doubt is your enemy here. The question of, "is this working?" need only be answered with "yes, of course, silly.")
I feel the stretch of my hands tug at tendons and bones and skin, from the base of the fingers they extend excruciatingly slowly away from my wrists and palms. While my eyes stay shut, I just know if I was to open them, I'd see the uncannily distorted visage of a hand, lengthening in size while my fingers are gradually consumed by encroaching skin, binding their movement somewhat. They plump up slightly feeling oddly pudgy against the ground below as I feel my fingertips push harder into the surface.
There are three parts to what has happened so far in the mind. I identified an internal sensation, supported it with a visual description, and grounded it with an external sensation (in this case, the actual ground). Let's continue. I get antsy when I stop mid-change.
Prickling points count numerous across the back of my misshapen hand, starting as a barely noticeable warmth under the skin before they bloom into patchy waves of itchy heat. Sprouting bristles curl out from beneath my stretched skin in what is reminsicent of stubble. As they grow, they arrange themselves into slightly scraggly patches of cream colored fur. A feverish heat envelops my hands, as the remaining gaps between patches are filled out. I can feel my fur brush against the ground and am accutely aware of a miniscule tug across my skin where disturbed fur connects.
With another flex, I dig my not-quite-fingers further into the ground. With time they've grown plump in some areas while in others the knuckles shape the fur around around them. I know if someone were to see them, they'd think them to be unmistakably canine digits, and that sends a thrill through me. I can feel the thickening at the bottoms of these digits of rough pads bubbling from roughened skin. I can feel the lovely way they deform against the ground, squishing out to the sides ever so slightly.
The change is awfully slow, the strain on my muscles becoming a rising burn that I relieve with a quick relaxation and retensing of my paws—yes, paws. To call them anything else when I can feel how much potential rests within each, the power pulsing in waves down to their very ends. I want to use that power. I want to feel the release of it. I dig the digits in further and feel spiking pressure where blunt nails are rapidly feeling thicker and thicker. I'd describe the sensation as a fascinatingly grotesque sliding of bone from between my own skin. I feel that in the claws which emmerge from my digits, curling wickedly into blunted points.
Euphoric. Absolutely euphoric feeling my claws sink into the ground, my mattress. I feel the piercing sensation with each pressure against the weak material. Every drag of a paw against it tugs gloriously at the base of each sunken claw, tearing right through. I push myself up on my new paws and feel the way the weight shifts on the pads of them. It's perfect, it's everything. I want to go further, make all of me just like these wonderful paws. For sake of demonstrative brevity, I'll leave it at that. I'll be content and lay my head onto these soft paws of mine.
If you did do what I suggested and let yourself become me for this demonstration, hold onto those sensations you may be experiencing, the form and feeling of it. They are very real right now if you let them be. If you wish to let them go, it's as easy as releasing held posture and the paws will quickly revert back to whatever form they took previously. Of course, anything fades with time, so you may start to feel your grasp on these paws of ours slipping and fading. That's alright, it's easy enough to start again from the top. You can stop reading here if you really don't want to lose them.
This is my form of active affirmations in a nutshell. When I don't have a physical method of affirmation (attire, visual aids like VR, etc.), this works wonders without needing anything else. I can apply it all across the body, recontextualizing sensations to new shapes and sizes. It doesn't fix things. It doesn't forever sate the yearning. I still look for the next best way to feel closer to what I wish to be. But this helps. At the very least, that next time that I stumble into something and find myself craving to be beastly, or cuddly, or what have you, I have the tools to satisfy that craving if I have focus and patience.
I remember many nights years and years ago when I'd be reaching for the exact same goal desperately. I'd be chasing a sensation, hunting for a deep satisfaction, and missing the mark by hairs. Hypnosis files, meditation attempts, induced lucid dreaming, among other methods.
Is it odd to not have ever experienced a sensation and yet know it intimately all the same? It feels almost torturous in a way. Knowing and getting close, but never properly experiencing it. Merely imitations, even if visceral ones.
To add to the cruelty is the failing focus of the mind to hold onto an experience and its resulting sensations. It fades like a dream, slipping between one's metaphorical fingers and leaving the faintest of traces that it even occured.
Let me make some assurances in light of this. Even as the dream fades, as paws fizzle out back into fleshy hands, it doesn't mean that it wasn't real to you. You still experienced it, possibly viscerally, and that's a beautiful thing. What's real and what isn't in the realm of personally percieved physical realities is purely up to you. You are whatever you wish to be, and if you can induce a sensation, that sensation was very much so part of your reality. You had paws, sweetheart! You still can have them if you let yourself seek it out again. It's all up to you.
