(Oh I love disambiguation! I will tell you!)
Back then, the term “Otherkin” described a specific circumstance, rather than an identity.
I know this sounds a bit squirrely considering it's always been characterized as an identity, so allow me to give a bit of background about the composition of Otherkinity as I learned to understand it:
There’s a faculty we have which I call “the kinesthetic sense.” We feel this sense very strongly until about the age of 3, after which the majority of us lose it (usually completely around the age of 7, it seems). The process of getting it back is a whole ball of wax, but the key takeaway here is that losing it causes us forget everything this sense has ever detected and what it’s like to have it. As a result, trying to discuss the impressions of this sense to those who don’t have it online, is like trying to talk about color theory to those who’ve only seen the world in grayscale.
Anyway, what this sense does is perceive the internally-felt landscape of shapes, colors, movements, and tones that define the “shape” or “energy” of an individual consciousness or phenomenon. Vividly detecting our own energy with this sense recalls the memory of our True Self—that is, what we know (not speculate, but Know) about ourselves.
This is a profoundly distinct experience that feels unlike any other feeling or emotion you'll ever have in your entire life. You will know it when you experience it, and you will feel like a nincompoop thinking you knew before.
It’s not as though everyone who has this sense-faculty online is Otherkin—it’s just that this sense is the modality through which this circumstance is discovered. It’s called an “Awakening” because the realization coincides with the kinesthetic sense “waking up” or coming back online again. During this process, some people discover (or rather, remember) that they’re something other than human, and that they’re just spending time incarnated as one for whatever reason.
The problem lies in how to describe this to a broader audience in a way that doesn’t sound incomprehensible. That’s where the identity bit comes into play: It’s easier for people to believe someone identifies as a dragon than it is for them to believe they are one. Framing it this way also leaves room for the benefit of the doubt: At the end of the day, there’s no way to know whether this phenomenon is spiritual or psychological in nature, so describing it as personal gnosis avoids attributing it to something unfalsifiable.
…And of course, putting it this way also prevents (or, rather, prevented) Otherkin from getting caught up in a narrative that they were in any way an exception to the human condition. Regardless of what they understand themselves to be, they're being human now.
Nowadays, it seems like “being Otherkin/Alterhuman” is defined the same way as “being transgender” is, in that it’s characterized by experiencing some kind of dysphoria around being human. The communities also seem to serve the same function that trans communities do, in that they’re places for people to explore their identities and connect with each other within that context.
However, this wasn’t the primary function that the old-school Otherkin communities I was part of served. Their primary function was to be—shall we say—a place for people to discuss color theory. And that’s what I’m looking for now.
dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
