Liveblogging Being An Otherkin

Welcome, friends! This blog is dedicated to blogging about the experience of being otherkin. We want to provide resources for our fellow nonhumans as well as for the curious and the questioning, and will be recording our own experiences along the way. This blog is run by two otherkin; one amorphous shapeshifter whose origin is unknown and one alienkin shapeshifter. Our names are Smith and Feral, respectively. We hope you find what you're looking for here!

[some-otherkin]

S: Kintype: Facts & Fiction (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

Well, as some kind of freeform spirit thing, I'm not sure how many facts I'm going to be able to provide about my kintype. I could go into things in fiction that are vaguely like me, but wouldn't you rather hear about the term "polymorph" as it's used outside of the otherkin community I know I would I own three dictionaries

• Polymorphism is defined as "the condition of occurring in several different forms" by whatever dictionary Google uses the Oxford American College Dictionary. • In biology polymorphism can be used to refer to species with multiple clearly different forms within a single population, sometimes excluding sexual dimorphism. • It can also be used to refer specifically to genetic variations. • Polymorphic materials are materials that form multiple crystal structures. There's also a related occurrence called polyamorphism, which sounds really cool. • In computer science, polymorphism can be used to refer to a thing which works on different kinds of thing and I'd have to spend more than twenty minutes reading to understand anything further than that • Polymorphic code is code that adjusts itself while continuing to serve the same function. This is cool.

Look these things up yourself, as they are cool and interesting. Do not ask me about them, as I tried to read about too many things at once and my head kind of shorted.

[some-otherkin]

S: Identity: Doubts (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

I only have so much time online man

It's in my nature to question myself, often to the point of intense anxiety. I try to shift it away from doubt and toward critical examination (which I consider an important part of my daily breakfast), but that doesn't keep me from almost constantly thinking on some level "wow I'm probably wrong about everything."

Doubts specific to my nonhuman identity take a few forms. The initial one was "you're obviously just copying Feral," which still crops up now and again. "You're just creating false memories," it says, "you just want to be more like your friends." However, while I'll occasionally forget details that are weird to forget, I don't exactly have a history of working in new stuff. While the idea is frequent, it's not potent, and I can easily discard it at this point.

Next up we have the idea that I'm just identifying myself as nonhuman to cope with derealization or some kind of dissociative thing. This was a big one for a while, but then I realized I don't care. If it's a coping mechanism it's an effective and persistent one. Whatever.

I also worry that this whole thing is just a game I forgot I was playing. I pretended to be an eagle and a seagull and various kinds of dragon and was at one point fairly convinced I was physically part cat, who's to say I didn't at some point decide to pretend I was an abstract being formed often of eyes, hands, and light? I was a weird kid. I honestly don't have that much defense against this one, but it doesn't bother me much because I think it's really funny. Like, what if someone went into a building for the air conditioning and pretended they worked there to keep from getting kicked out and people believed them and they started showing up for work and got promoted and ultimately ended up pursuing a career as a businessman at a company they didn't work for. I mean, ethereal limbs have a distinctly different feeling from imaginary ones and require a different kind of focus to change, so that would still have to be explained. And the one section of my head that was never convinced I was part cat and generally just lets me do shit because it considers me beneath it - the same part that ultimately dismantled my identity as a Christian because it was bored with the religion - seems to be entirely in on and okay with my identity as nonhuman. But the idea that I'm just like. A guy in a mascot suit standing in the middle of a bunch of bears, completely convinced that I, too, am a bear. Is really funny to me right now. Pretty sure I'm not a guy in a mascot suit, though.

Finally, I have some issues with the fragmentation of my identity and/or personality. This is a topic for another day and I'm not explaining it here. However, while I, as an entity, feel nonhuman and often envision myself as such, the mental vis for each individual fragment is based entirely on my physical appearance either as it is or as it has been in the past. Only one of them will even allow itself to be represented as nonhuman/oid on a semi-regular basis, and that's just because it likes the idea of having claws. I question how I can be nonhuman if no individual part of my being that was not created is nonhuman - but then, said parts, while they may appear human or human-ish, are no more human than a photograph or a memory. They are transient and abstract, and while they may be part of my definition, they are not all of it.

[some-otherkin]

S: Identity: Other aspects of your identity (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

I've been staring uneasily at this prompt since I found the challenge. Even if I had a unified concept of "identity" - which I don't, more on that later if I ever feel comfortable discussing it - the prompt is pretty open-ended, and I don't always work well with open-ended. Numerous aspects contribute to one's condition as oneself, and it's difficult to choose between them. I guess I'll go with the things people tend to associate most heavily with personal identity as of late - namely, gender and sexuality.

I'm asexual and aromantic, though the term idemromantic could theoretically apply in place of the latter term. I choose to use "aromantic," though, because of some personal experiences involving its applicability. Without going into detail, I choose to use "aromantic" as a nice "fuck you" to the part of myself that has long insisted that emotionally intimate relationships are inherently romantic, and that I must therefore be alloromantic. Definitely asexual, though - while I'm not sex repulsed, I Do Not Understand the concept of finding another being sexually attractive. I've had dreams where I was allosexual and while I don't know how accurate they were they sure were weird as hell and only confuse me further.

I am genderfluid. While some genderfluid individuals seem to shift between a number of specific genders, I'm all over the spectrum. Sometimes I'll go through phases where I alternate primarily between masculine or feminine identities, or where I sit in one general area on the chart I've mentally constructed, but generally it's just like "I was agender thirty seconds ago but now I'm definitely a guy" and "yesterday's gender was ??? today's gender is ¿¿¿ stay tuned next week for a smattering of random symbols and disgust at the concept of genitalia."

I also collect pokemon paraphernalia, which is way more important to me than either of the above subjects. I just bought a sticker book for my pokemon stickers. It's arriving on Wednesday. I'm so excited.

[some-otherkin]

S: Identity: How/Why You Are Otherkin (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

Maybe I was previously some kind of ethereal being and decided I wanted to interact directly with the physical world. Maybe my soul just didn't take correctly to my body. Maybe my identity is the result of my depersonalization and not the other way around. Still trying to figure this one out.

[some-otherkin]

S: Identity: History/Development (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say I always knew I was different (or various other cliches), but I did always experience roughly the same disconnect that I do now. I pretty much just assumed everyone was the same thing as me when I was a kid. I grew up in a Christian household, which in my case meant lots of talking about souls and listening to music about not belonging on earth. I assumed feeling nonhuman, amorphous, disconnected from my body (the term, I now know, is depersonalization), and otherwise as I do was simply a side effect of having a soul.

Of course, I went through the fairly standard games of imagination phase as a tiny being (I was a seagull the house was antarctica you didn't need to question it you just needed to buy me gummy worms) but there were also a number of involuntary things I attributed to an overactive imagination. I used to use my ethereal limbs as a writing resource ("how fucking annoying would it be to have wings in a house" ca. middle school being the earliest vivid memory of this). I would feel like my being was fluctuating wildly from shape to shape when I was stressed out. "This is normal," I thought. "I am a normal human being."

It was toward the end of high school, I think, that I learned about the concept of otherkin. I'd seen the term here and there online, but didn't really think anything of it. It was just another obscure concept people complained about on meme websites. The only personal encounters I'd had with proclaimed otherkin or therians were with the "murder people not wolves" types on deviantArt during my brief and regrettable interest in some anti-wolfaboo guild. I'd pretty much forgotten nonhumans existed, honestly - and then Feral informed me that he wasn't human.

I believe my external response was pretty much "that's cool as hell," but my internal response also included "are you saying my blue limbs ((as I referred to them at the time)) might not be weird delusions." Of course, after that point I spent a while trying to convince myself that my identity as nonhuman was fake and that I was just subconsciously imitating my friends "again" (though I can never come up with a specific instance of this having happened), but after some time and some crying and some involuntary shifting - I've ended up here. I am nonhuman. It's me.

[some-otherkin]

S: Identity: Current (30 Day Otherkin Challenge)

The most accurate term to describe me would be "energy-based polymorph," I think, but I tend to use the word amorphous with various suffixes (amorphous polymorph, amorphous entity, amorphous blob). While polymorph is a useful label to me, I don't think it accurately describes the amount of time I spend feeling like a pile of unrecognizable nonsense.

Lately I spend the majority of my time in either a genuinely formless state or filling in my body, but other frequently visited forms include humanoid beings with wing-limbs, things that crawl, kind of snake, a pile of arms, and some eyes. Would you believe that I thought this was normal growing up.

I also identify strongly with ouroboros and with snakes in general, but while I did briefly consider myself a snake I'm fairly certain I identify with them because I like them and share some aspects with them, not vice versa. So I'm not snake-kin, but I'm. Snake-kith?

[some-otherkin]

F: To those of you who post hate in the tags and/or generally disrespect otherkin: May I have your attention for a moment? 

Alright, so I know Otherkin/Therian can be a really strange and hard to understand identity for a lot of people, but that is no excuse to harass us.

I’m sure most of you have experienced some sort of ridicule in your lives and know what it’s like to have someone else reject or belittle you for something that you consider to be an integral part of your identity. It sucks to have someone else beat you down for something that you can’t change about yourself, especially if the person in question is just doing it because they don’t understand you.

Otherkin/Therians do not identify as animals/”mythical” creatures/etc. for fun. You are not an otherkin because you like certain animals/mythical creatures/etc. You are not an otherkin because you think you act like a certain animal/mythical creature/etc. You are an otherkin because you have done a lot of soul searching/meditating/whatever you feel is right and realised that at your core, in your soul, at the very centre of your being; you are at least partially nonhuman. This is called “Awakening”, and can take as long or as short a time as it needs to depending on the individual in question. Every otherkin has gone through some sort of Awakening, whether they realise it or not. After an otherkin has Awakened, some (including myself) will have recalled memories of their past lives and/or have the ability to spiritually sense or physically feel the body parts that their human bodies do not possess (x,x). In short, we truly believe ourselves to be nonhuman, either through reincarnation or some other incomprehensible error in the cosmos. Regardless of whether or not you believe it, we do. It’s not something we just choose to be to seem special or something. Even if you straight up think it’s bullshit, think about this. Would you make fun of someone like a Christian or a Muslim for their beliefs?

As stated above, we truly believe we are not human, and we have ample reasons to believe this. Some of you seem to think the otherkin identity is harmful to those who deal with gender identity struggles. It isn’t. In case you were unaware, being trans/nonbinary is not even remotely related to being otherkin. The former is an issue of not identifying with the gender you were assigned by society/your biology/what have you, while otherkin is believing yourself to not be human on a metaphysical level. We aren’t trying to make fun of trans/nonbinary folk, in fact there are a fair number of otherkin that are also trans/nonbinary (the mods of this blog are examples of such). However, the two do not go hand-in-hand. They’re two entirely separate issues that have nothing in common aside from the base principal of “my body does not match x.” Don’t throw a completely unrelated identity under the bus to promote your own. You’re only feeding the perception that it’s alright to make fun of people for believing that they’re different than you.

Going off of the previous point, harassment of otherkin usually centres around the idea that Otherkin are actually just crazy and therefore have no merit and should be ridiculed because “look at those lunatics over there”. Stop it. Just stop. I’m not going to sit here and explain the concept of ableism to you because it’s been done already, but what you’re doing when you harass otherkin like that is inherently ableist. Even if you ignore everything I’ve previously stated about treating us with basic human decency, you’re still ridiculing a group of people because you think they have some type of mental disorder and you need to stop. On a related note; if you justify your harassment by saying something like "They aren't human, so I don't have to treat them like humans," I'm going to have to ask you to take a huge step back and think about what you just said. 

It’s true that the Otherkin/Therian community contains a lot of toxic and harmful individuals. There’s a lot of infighting. It’s not really a great place to be sometimes. But there are toxic people in every community. Though the Otherkin/Therian community tends to have a higher concentration of them, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good individuals in it as well. Just like with every community on the Internet or outside of it, you have to be careful who you interact with. Some may just want to manipulate you, but that doesn’t mean everyone is like that. I’m not telling you to not be wary, I’m telling you to not be prejudiced.

There are some people who are not otherkin, but they pretend to be. I really don’t want to spend too much time on this section, but to sum it up there’s a clear difference between 1) someone who actually identifies as nonhuman, 2) someone who is exploring their identity, 3) someone who is just pretending to be nonhuman because they have nothing better to do, and 4) someone who made a troll blog. There are people who exist in all four of these categories. Sometimes the difference between some of them may not be as readily noticeable as you may like. Don’t try to put everyone in the community into one category. Just pay attention and you’ll be able to tell the difference. And regarding point number 4; if you go on someone's blog and see something like a list of genders that includes entirely contradictory things, or a kintype that seems absolutely, utterly ridiculous (Pico from Boku no Pico, for example) the blog you're looking at is more than likely not serious. 

Regardless of what I've said so far, some of you may think we’re crazy. That’s understandable, kinfolk aren’t something you encounter all that often in daily human life. Some of us question ourselves too. Some of us don't. Either way, at the end of the day, we know we're not human. Speaking from my own experiences, I know I’m not human because the memories I have are too real for me. The ethereal limbs that I feel are far too vivid. Whether or not you think that’s a load of bullshit or not, these things are important to me. I believe in them with all my heart, and frankly I don’t think believing in them affects my stability on this planet. I still go about my daily life just like you do, and you wouldn’t know the difference unless I pulled you aside and said, “Hey, I’m not human.” You think it’s dangerous that we “live in a different reality” than you do, but we don’t. We simply have different beliefs, sometimes we have different issues than the ones you face. That doesn’t make us any better or worse than you. It just means we’re different.

I can’t speak for everyone here, and feel free to add things to this post that I may have missed (or correct anything that I got wrong), but I think we’d all be quite happy if the rest of you could at least attempt to understand us and stop harassing us. We may not be human, but we still deserve the same basic respect that you give those who are human.

Thanks for listening!

[some-otherkin]

S: Hey! As you may or may not have noticed, we've been sort of intensely inactive. In an attempt at getting in the habit of posting again, I've decided to do the 30 Days of Otherkin Challenge by Meirya (of Wordpress and Tumblr). Feral's going to join me, but we will be making separate posts.

[some-otherkin]

S: People acting like otherkin are trying to get everyone to believe the same as them like jfc most otherkin's belief systems don't even mesh with each other's we just want you to stop being dicks to us

[some-otherkin]

S: Also feeling like I need to fiX THE DAMN LAYOUT

[some-otherkin]

S: Feeling large and detached.

[some-otherkin]

F: Hello friends, Feral here! I talked about something on my personal blog just now and felt it was important enough to share the concept on here as well, so here goes!

For those of you who are Otherkin, I'm sure you've heard something like this at least once in your experiences, and if you have not then I encourage you to read on for future reference.

I've seen a lot of individuals encourage doubting yourself; they tell you to doubt your memories, doubt your phantom limbs, and so on. Here's my thoughts on the matter. Do not doubt yourself if you do not feel that is right. Personally, I feel as though doubting my origins does my people and my Homeworld a gross disservice. Conversely, if you feel that doubt is healthy and choose to question your beliefs, that is also fine.

What I ask is that you take the time to figure out for yourself the right path for you to take. For a while I felt pressured by my peers. I felt that if I didn't state that I doubted myself, they would see me as a lesser being, or they would think I was pretending to be Otherkin. And so, for years, I would say things like, "Haha, yeah, I'm not sure about this, but you know, if it is true-" when really, I did not believe what I was saying for a second.

I've finally realised that this is not the right approach. So my task for you is this; take some time. Do what you must. Meditate, go outside, whatever it is you do when you think about these sorts of things. Ask yourself: Do you doubt your current beliefs? If the answer is yes, that is fine. If the answer is no, that is also fine. But do not let other individuals tell you how to think about yourself.

Do not let them tell you how to go about finding your identity. Do not let anyone tell you you are or are not Otherkin or Therian for any reason. The only one who can tell you if you are truly Otherkin or Therian is yourself. The only one who can tell you if you doubt your beliefs is yourself. And the only one who can decide what your beliefs are to begin with is yourself. You decide your own path. Do not let peer pressure shepherd you into one.

[some-otherkin]

Otherkin: A Brief Definition

Otherkin are people who identify as nonhuman in a physical, spiritual, or psychological sense. Otherkin can identify as any earthly or non-earthly being, ranging everywhere from earth animals to celestial bodies or light-based entities. However, creatures who identify as earthly animals are usually classified as Therian.

Otherkin are not people who identify strongly with a specific species or being, or feel a spiritual connection with said species or being without identifying as that thing themselves. (This is not meant to imply that otherkin cannot experience such connections, but that it is not what makes them otherkin.)

[some-otherkin]

Hello, there! Our names are Feral and Smith. While we are sort of writing this introduction in tandem, future posts made on the blog will be preceded by an F or an S to indicate the author, as such:

F: Hello there! I am Feral; an alienkin shapeshifter from a far off, isolated planet. I will try to post resources here, but many of my posts may involve me discussing certain aspects of being otherkin and how I deal with them and explain them to others if the need arises. My aim is to assist others in my position and inform those looking for information, possible otherkin or not.

S: Wow, I don't like trying to summarize myself. Too many things. Too many confusing things. I am some kind of amorphous shapeshifter. As I only fairly recently began recognizing myself as an otherkin you can expect more liveblogging than anything from me. Questioning everything is fairly standard for me, I think, and while broadcasting my questions is not something I generally do I feel like what solutions I find could be helpful to others in my situation.

As this is the first post on the blog, we thought we ought to write something of a mission statement. We have two goals: to record our personal journeys through understanding our identities as otherkin, and to provide objective resources for otherkin and for people curious about the label. While we are hardly authorities on the subject, we hope we can be helpful to those who are questioning aspects of their identity or seeking information.

[some-otherkin]

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