sometimes i feel like the alterhuman community is super obsessed with reality in an often unhealthy sort of way? you dont need to have Literally Experienced things for them to be real to you. You dont have to actually believe in past lives or anything to feel you have had a past life experience. You dont need to really believe that you are an alien that came from beyond earth to feel like an alien that came from beyond earth. You don't need to believe in the multiverse to feel like you are experiencing something to do with it. Just like how nobody else has to believe in those things to understand that you feel them. You can do whatever you want actually. Feelings are fickle things and they do not care about what you believe is true, and this is not always a bad thing despite what people might say.
Sometimes you are a shapeshifting starthing from beyond the veil of space and time while simultaneously believing that that's not actually possible. Sometimes you have spirits in your head while simultaneously not believing in anything metaphysical. Sometimes you have reincarnated beings in your head without believing in reincarnation. The dissonance is perfectly okay if that's what brings you peace - it is what brings me peace. I do not feel any desire to "debunk" myself or my headmates despite my beliefs, nor do I feel a desire to bring any of the things I currently find impossible into how I understand the world. Your identity does not need to be perfectly explainable within the bounds of anyone's reality, including your own, because it is not something that relies on anything but your own feelings. Live a life that brings you peace
Perhaps this is moving away from the point a little, but I feel like this conundrum especially does a disservice to communication. If you only allow yourself to describe your experiences by what you completely, absolutely believe to be true and real, you limit your options for language and communication, and it becomes harder to find the words to describe yourself. Describing two of our kintypes, We might say that We are/We feel like a violin that gained a soul, and then that soul got stretched into a dragon shape before being put into my body. Do We one hundred percent believe that this is what definitely, literally happened? No! We're using poetry to try to communicate something that doesn't really fit any words at all! We're gesturing in the general direction of what's going on with our identity so that others can understand it enough. They might never understand it perfectly, but that's okay, they just have to get the gesture.
I can't really blame people for being so concerned about what is "real"; tangible, probable "reality" is what people use to hurt us, after all, whether that's casual mockery or psychiatric institutionalization, all because our beliefs don't align with "objective reality". But I think we (honestly, both inside and outside the alterhuman community) should become more comfortable with the idea of something being a gesture at whatever's really going on, or an imperfect attempt at communicating something that might be impossible to perfectly communicate. It's language, not reality. Communication is messy and identity is messy; don't make up rules for yourself, make some poetry to express yourself. The world of language is your curtain of worms on a string; even if what you make looks silly, if it brings you joy and helps you express yourself, then that's what really matters.
















