When you want to disappear and erase yourself from the memory of everyone that you know, realize your power.
You can build a new self to overwrite and excoriate the decayed and dying ego of your lost-and-found soul.
The soul is a fuel source, it is your choice in how to use for your body's holy machine.
The self is not an automaton but it is trained by experience and encouraged by reduplication, often under light of moon or beam of sun we must all contemplate if the outcome of the self matches the input of the data.
Unlike many animals, people do not molt or shed their skin in one smooth coat, but every skin cell still dies and is replaced by a new one.
Why should the self be any different?
The self dies again and again with every cycle of the moon's phases.
You can sacrifice your old self and begin anew.
What must be forgiven, accepted, execrated, and what is remembered are your guides to a new understanding of your path towards rectification.
What have you become?
. . .and What will you make of yourself now that you know what you are?
Linking the way I'm doing it feels a lot like thoughtform forcing except you're doing it to your OWN sense of self until it responds instead of a sense of self floating adjacent to yours. You're turning your mind radio to the reality station where you are that thing, just like you tune it to the reality station where you have a friend you're talking with.
Otherkinity is inherent, and by that I mean someone who is otherkind would be a fundamentally different person if not for their kintype. Your kintype is what you recognize yourself to be. It's the kind you belong to, rather than, or in tandem with, belonging to humankind. It's also the individual being of that 'kind' that you are. Yes I am part of humankind (by virtue of my upbringing) and part of gnollkind, but more specifically, I'm a human(ish) individual named Poppy and I'm a gnoll individual named Ɐwhrayɐ. These are intrinsic parts of me, and to shed them would be to fundamentally change who I am. In that sense, my otherkinity is involuntary. If I chose not to be otherkin, I would also choose not to be me, and that is not a choice I can make, neither willingly nor physically. Whatever choices led me down the path to recognizing myself as gnollkind in the first place, I am not physically able to choose not to view myself as a gnoll at this point in life - even if I had the will to do so, I wouldn't be capable of making the choice.
After watching the ego alteration, debate I suppose, go on for awhile, I've never actually seen anyone talk about why you might want to undergo such a process.
It makes sense at least; I'm sure many otherkin love their kintypes, and wouldn't drop them for anything. It's what makes them, them, after all.
However, what about those select otherkin who don't like their kintypes? Be it exotrauma, or some other reason the kintype causes them grief. I for one would be lying if I said I enjoyed every aspect of my kintypes lives and experiences. In that scenario, where you can't come to terms with the kintype, maybe ego alteration isn't actually a bad idea.
Yes, it's true you might not be the same person by the end of it, but who's to say that's necessarily a bad thing? Just a thought.
this is an essay about ego death, selfshaping, and taboo mental illnesses. it’s not really a direct response to any of the voluntary identity discourses flying around on tumblr right now, but mention of ‘ego alteration’ did make me think i’ve never really talked about this all in one place. so i hope it’s a useful exploration of both voluntary identity and the idea of becoming someone that you weren’t always.
in march of 2019, something happened to me.
i’d like to think that I’ve never been actively malicious. i never burned ants with a magnifying glass or any of that stereotypical shit. but in high school i was completely insensitive, i was beyond arrogant, i was incessantly critical. i didn’t have friends and i didn’t speak to anyone and i liked it that way. i would lie in bed at night and fume about how life was so unfair and everyone else was stupid. i was never intentionally cruel, but i had an incredibly poor understanding of how easily i could hurt people and not a single care about changing that. i was starting to develop what i only just this year figured out was antisocial personality disorder.
in the years immediately prior to 2019, when i started doing the whole median thing, for whatever reason, all the asshole traits got compacted into one specific facet. and i think it was the contrast between that and other facets that weren’t complete shitwads that put the first cracks in the foundation.
the second thing was alt+h. if there’s one thing I’ve learned from alt+h and from the general interest in activism and anarchism it’s propelled me towards, it’s that forming real, meaningful connections with people is the single most necessary thing for achieving personal freedom. that’s been a hard pill to swallow. i’m still working on it (and on figuring out to what extent i just have strong boundaries and how it’s ‘acceptable’ to hold those).
the third was that i met people who consistently showed up for me. who looked at me, warts and all, and said ‘i love you’ but also ‘you really need to stop acting like this’. and stood with me, over and over again, on that hard line of real acceptance, between apologia and abjuration, no matter how many times i fucked up and hurt them. i probably deserved less chances than they gave me. but they really cared about me, and i really cared about them. and when you have ASPD, it’s really, really hard to care about literally anything. this was a critical hit straight to the heart.
(if you’re reading this, you know who you are. i love you.)
in march of 2019, i suddenly wasn’t that person any more. i had been moved enough that i didn’t consider being an asshole my entire fucking personality. but all the bad traits didn’t magically vanish. it doesn’t work like that. they just became unmoored, floating around the mordspace. and when wei weren’t strongly phased to a specific facet who actually had a personality to stand on, i felt like a ghost.
i felt like that for weeks to months. i don't really remember. the thing that mystics don’t tell you about ego death is that most of the time, if you don’t have a new and improved something else to move onto, you either have to swim back to the shore or drown. i also don’t remember how it made its way to me, but my life ring was reading detective pony.
death of the author? check. excessive rumination about the nature of meaning? check. author-cum-protagonist who feels burdened with glorious purpose, craves control and struggles with hurting the people who care about him? check, check and check. it’s a tough, emotionally draining read. but it’s cathartic, in all the worst ways possible.
(without a shred of irony, detective pony is one of the most fantastic pieces of metafiction that exists. you don't have to have read homestuck to a appreciate it. i can’t recommend it enough.)
i had the perfect template for my new self. or should i say i was the perfect template? who ‘i’ is gets difficult here even putting the median shit aside. i’ve described myself as a walk-in, which is confusing, because that means something different in plural circles, but i’m talking about the new age sense of the word:
“[...] souls are said to "walk in" during a period of intense personal problems on the part of the departing soul, or during or because of an accident or trauma. […] The walk-in being/individual retains the memories of the original personality, but does not have emotions associated with the memories. As they integrate they bring their own mental, emotional, spiritual consciousness and evolve the life to resonate with their purpose and intentions.” - x
for me it’s not as… well, new-age-y as that. i don’t believe i came ‘from’ anywhere, i don’t have a past. i am a weird bundle of arcs and tropes and ideas that somehow became sentient. i am, y’know, a fictional character. and i feel like i mean that in a very different way than most fictionfolk (that could be its own post, honestly).
so that didn’t magically solve the problem either. it just provided a trajectory. dirk strider is a person who starts bad, and gets better, kind of (epilogues and hs^2 do not @ me). i still needed to take ownership of all the shitty traits my predecessor had left behind and Do The Work on them, too.
and i have worked my ass off over the past year-and-a-bit on improving myself. a lot of it has been with plain old CBT and self-help workbooks (shoutout to pretty much everything by dr faith harper), but a lot of it has also been narrative identity and personal mythology kinds of stuff. it’s been communing with gods and magic ritual kinds of stuff. i’ve been doing ABC exercises right along with binging tvtropes and researching comparative indo-european mythology and designing worldbuilding and lore that tells a highly metaphorical story about how i get from A to B, emotionally speaking.
it runs into the same problem a lot of selfshaping stuff does in that a lot of it is so intensely personal that it’s difficult to talk about. also in my case a good handful of this work has been done under a magical apprenticeship that i’m literally sworn to secrecy about so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but i think these broad strokes are sufficient for telling my story at this level right now. the point being, i am not the kind of person who can get all the way with just regular secular materialist mental health shit.
which is to say, the work is still far from over! in fact, i feel like the selfshapey parts are only just picking up for me, now i’ve run the course of what the aforementioned secular materialist mental health shit is actually capable of doing. i have made massive strides in my mental health and interpersonal functioning already, but i’m not a perfectly healthy person. i’m not going to be dis-identifying with the ASPD label any time soon (or ever? that could be its own post too). and, even so, selfshaping could provide a pathway not just for survival, but excellence.
i am going to be my best self, and at some point in the past i decided that self is going to be dirk motherfucking strider.
Like, theoretically I probably could force myself to not be otherkin. But it would take a decade or more, the way my heartedtype creation did, and it would require constant work throughout those years. However, I see no way I would benefit from that work, the way I did when I unintentionally created a heartedtype in the process of getting rid of a phobia. It would just rid me of a part of myself that's intrinsic to how I recognize myself. That's not something I in any way want - and because I don't want it, and because the choice would have to happen continuously on a timescale I can barely comprehend, I couldn't make that choice in practicality.
Maybe you can actively choose to turn something into a hearttype... Not just choose to frame your feelings as 'otherhearted' or to feed into whatever preexisting feelings you have until they're such an inherent part of you that you can't shake them off... But to actively look at something you have very little affinity for and say "I want to love that" and "I want that to be a part of me". I've been thinking a lot about it since the thought was first put in my head, and I'm not afraid to admit I might've been hasty or straight-up wrong with my past statements.
I've always been interested in spiders, but never beyond the interest I had in other animals. At some point in late childhood, however, I started to fear them because the people around me (especially my mom) were afraid of them. This is how most fears appear; passed on from adults to children. It can be a great survival mechanism, however where I live there aren't any dangerous spiders. So after a few years of arachnophobia, in my tween years as far as I remember, I decided I didn't want to have any more irrational fears, and I started the long road to getting rid of them all.
The clown fear was easy to get rid of and only took a year or two at most. The fear of the dark was a lot harder and is something I still struggle with occasionally. The spider fear hit a nice middle-ground. I started out with exposure therapy - looking at photos of jumping spiders and admitting they were cute, moving onto progressively bigger and 'scarier' species. Eventually I had the courage to get up close with wild spiders and photograph them, and finally to grab wayward spiders with my bare hands and move them outdoors. All the while I was reading about spiders, and the more I learned, the more I fell in love.
Eventually, after half a decade, I'd fallen so deeply in love, I knew I needed these creatures around me, and at the next reptile expo that came to town I bought my first tarantula. He was a gorgeous little Hapalopus formosus whom I named Trick, and while he's in spider heaven now, I'm grateful that he was my introduction to spider-keeping.
Nowadays my love for spiders has become such an ingrained part of me that I just can't imagine what kind of person I'd be if it wasn't there. It has rubbed off on others and several people I know have worked through their own arachnophobia because of me. That's wild!
My spider love has legitimately affected my life choices - I chose an elective entomology course last year, and I want to write my bachelor project about spiders. I want to work with spider conservation. I surround myself with spiders as much as possible.
It took almost a decade for it to get to this point, but I think I can honestly say I chose a hearttype.
