It’s so great to see anothe polymorph/shapeshifter who also has MaDD (I think the term for those is Xenreve if I’m not mistaken?)
May I ask about your kin experience while also having MaDD?
I don't know, maybe? To be fair I didn't know there was a term for that-
I'll look into it though, so if anyone has links-
It's a bit special, because I'm pretty sure I was a dog therian before anything else, but now it's shifted to being my main form as a shapeshifter.
I've daydreamed for as long as I can remember, and I don't mean the normal amount obviously: it's always been, and still is, a coping mechanism for me, dare I say the one I default too (art is a close second though, and I often mi the two).
As a note, my daydreaming hasn't been maladaptive for the last few years, but I still say I have madd. It's chronic the way I see it: if I'm not careful, it could become pathological again. Now i don't have to be careful all the time, but when I feel particularly bad I have to consciously use other ways to cope along with daydreaming, otherwise it still has a tendency to take over.
I like saying that until a few years back, I was fully living in my head. I had pretty much no life outside of my daydreams. And living fully in your daydreams for that long has had some interesting effects on my psyche and identity.
I've come to realise that I lived through my paraself because of multiple reasons, the main one being masking and being terrified to stop.
I mask way less now, and that's led to me feeling like my paraself, except reverse isekai'd: I barely have any memories outside of my daydreams until the years I "got out of my head", so it feels like being dropped from my world, the one I lived in 95% of the time, into this one.
Since my world is very much full of magic, there's a lot that didn't quite transfer to this body.
In source, I'm a shapeshifter. My constels and main forms are linked to this too: they're the forms I liked to take the most and the things I was and/or related to.
Now I also used to have magic. I could heal with it and create illusions. (I could also bend the elements a bit, but healing and illusions were my main ones).
I discovered earlier in childhood here witchcraft and forms of healing, and I've edged around it for a while (the healing methods, I've been practising witchcraft in this verse ever since I discovered it), but this year I've started learning to heal! It's not quite how it worked for me, but it's similar enough that it makes me really happy to be able to do so again.
For the illusion part, I've found performance arts the closest thing to it. I used to incorporate my magic into my art a lot, and I feel very connected to Everything when I'm performing, it's really euphoric.
That's all I can think about for now ahah, but I might reblog this with additions if I think of any ^^
In any case, thank you so much for the ask anon!! I love yapping and this was such an interesting and lovely question to answer <3