For those who had earlier signs or things that made you suspect of knowing you were different or a part of the therian/alterhuman community, what were they for you?
For me, the movie Wolf Children was huge because although I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it, I had such a connection to both Ame and Yuki, more specifically Yuki’s drive to exploration and being herself and Ame’s drive to be in the woods.
My friend had convinced me she was a reincarnated being, that creepypastas exist, and that she was in near-death experiences (I mention this in another post, won’t go into it to in-depth here but she wasn’t a part of the community),
So I had tried to experiment with a lot of attempts to physically shift, tried to go into special practices like shamanism, and was heavily inspired by werewolves, lycanthropy and draconic. I played so many animal games including WolfQuest & FeralHeart and downloaded a werewolf tracker app, desperate to find them out there (I don’t recommend this, hella dangerous to try and meet strangers in the woods like that)
I would explore the woods by my house, study the forest, and tried to better my own senses that were limited to my human body like night vision, noticing weather patterns, and understanding animal behavior and tracks. I also hardly drew myself without animal features or just an animal all together. Being human felt foreign to me.
I wanted so badly to be nonhuman and I envied her for having that experience, but I didn’t come across the therian community until late 2015 or so, which opened my eyes in a whole new light. I dove deep into the community and absorbed so much information about it, watched a ton of nature documentaries and even tried quadrobics (it’s fucking hard lmao).
It took until this past year to really explore therianthropy and alterhumanity again as I had pushed it down for a few years with how chaotic life had become, but now i have both a connection to myself but also its normalized in my life, not always in my thoughts but it is always there, and I both find comfort in it and a sense of peace.
It could be a delusion, it could be my neurodivergence, but regardless I am happy to be myself, even if it’s not really something I talk about openly outside of here, which is fine with me. It’s my own and I’m just happy to be me.
This became a bit of a ramble eheh but even now I look back at Wolf Children both with a bit of nostalgia but also as a reminder that that’s where it all began for me.