I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about being death and decay conceptkin, and I realized maybe I should talk about that more here since its sort of an overlooked part of the community.
I think I frequently forget to talk about it because it doesn't feel like an "identity" in the same way that therianthropy does. It's more like a collection of experiences and feelings. I wouldn't say that I strictly am death, but rather that death and decay run through me and speak to me. I don't quite know how to word it.
Ever since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with death and decay, but not really in a morbid or depressing way. I've always felt a kind of intimacy and one-ness with it. I would always try to seek out decay and surround myself with reminders of it. Bones, scraps of fur, moss, mushrooms, lichens, detrivores, and scavengers. The cycle, metamorphizing the dead form of one, into the new life of others, feels so important and comforting to me.
I sometimes feel like I am almost able to "speak" with decay, not in the classic talking to the dead kind of way, I don't believe in that sort of ghost. Instead, I feel like I share emotions and echoes of images with the rotting things of the world.
Occasionally, this mixes with my lycanthropic identity, having shifts of myself rotting as a werewolf or being covered in shaggy lichens and algae. More often, it feels like I am just a werewolf that is deeply tied into death and the transformative nature of decay in a pagan sense.
I would classify the way it feels as very slow, solemn, yet intimate, and comfortable.
It is a great one-ness and dissolution of self into the world around you.
