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Fluid Ferality
A history of shifting shapes
A cat stares out from under a desk, wild-eyed and and brimming with tension.
A horse tosses its mane mid-gallop through long grass.
Languid limbs of leopard drape over a tree branch.
A husky tromps through snow with abandon.
How do all the pieces fit together?
My early days understanding myself more formally as an animal-person were colored by stress and uncertainty about how to properly label the experience. At the time, the community pressured strongly toward single, neat answers. Anything else raised an eyebrow, so I went looking for the “True” self deep down. Wolf felt like an accurate name for it at first, but I started to have doubts fairly quickly. I wondered whether the frequency of wild and domestic feline feelings when I was a kid might be a clue. I contemplated foxes, another old favorite, and eventually coyotes, whom I’d never given much thought. At some point I dug a pit of doubt so deep I started looking at everything from rabbits to deer and various other mammals to find the singular heart of my nature. What the hell was I thinking?
Eventually, I snapped out of it enough to realize I didn’t need to start from scratch and discard everything I thought I knew about my own experiences. An herbivore I was not. Still, the feeling that almost any creature had the potential to ring true was confusing. I spent years agonizing over every brief experience and its possible significance.
I tried on broader labels as well, different models for wrangling my mental menagerie. I considered self-labeling with an entire phylogenetic clade. After all, I’d been trying and failing to find a single canid that always fit the bill. Maybe it’s just all of them? Every jackal and fox, worldwide wolves, dingos, dholes, the whole lot. But labeling it with the entire taxonomic family felt like an unsatisfying answer, a cop-out. And what about the other animals, those felines that still had a tendency to slink in at times, and other carnivores as well, albeit less frequently? If I considered all of Carnivora as a reference for myself, though, that seemed to include many animals I’d never felt like - too vague, too broad-brush. It also felt like it might grant too much significance to some of the experiences by making them all equivalent. Plus, what about the non-carnivores? Any line in the sand seemed arbitrary. And since it was often seen as worthy of suspicion to have more than one or maybe two animals as part of you, I resisted labeling these other vacillations as more than flukes.
But even my base experience was and is a bit blurry. For probably an entire decade I tried to find a perfect label for the medium-sized wolfish creature at the center of my animality - coyote, grey wolf, red wolf, eastern coyote, eastern wolf, some other particular species, subspecies or mix. All of them have seemed accurate enough. I can’t take the canine out of my head and look at its genes, so there’s really no proper objective label for the subjective experience. My canine feelings are probably general enough that any of the animals in the North American Canis “soup” are appropriate, as well as similar canines worldwide, with the exact perfect label simply fluctuating at any given time. Since coyotes vary so widely by locale and frequently contain an admixture of other canines, they represent a handily wide net to capture my variable small-wolf baseline. So, while sometimes I slide heavily toward grey wolf, red fox, or another canid, much of the time my experiences can be considered one or another flavor of coyote. Still, that desire for a crisp, neat label is hard to resist, even though the creatures in our heads have no reason to conform to taxonomy. Nature’s own idea of a species also isn’t very clean - no one species concept holds up consistently, so a perfect name for the creatures in our heads isn’t always even possible. But “coyote” at least usually covers it for me.
The feelings of other creatures used to throw off my sense of that canine center, though. I worried I was tricking myself with every bit of canid experience, since my baseline as a kid was largely feline. The soft-padded feet and liquid form seemed innate to me, the stretching of sheathed claws so real and right. The change to feeling more canine gradually happened when I was a preteen, before I ever learned of therianthropy, so I don’t think I was externally influenced by exposure to the concept and the popularity of wolves in the community. But the old feline ways weren’t totally gone. Every vacillation seemed to mark that I was missing something - how was I supposed to tell the difference between something integral and something passing? Or, as I now tend to think, maybe the significance is not only in the animals themselves, but in the fluidity between them?
In childhood, it was simple to fully embody in play whatever animal seemed right at the moment. To be a husky in the snow, a leopard lurking in a tree, a wallowing crocodile, or a swimming otter were all equally accessible to me, all just as real as one another. Even if I don’t “play” as these animals in a voluntary way anymore, that fluid experience of feeling like other animals and perceiving parts of my body like theirs remains. I wonder at the cause - just a big imagination, or is it also related to empathy? Maybe some kind of mirror neuron hypersensitivity, responding to animals’ actions? I have struggled for most of my life with a hyper-empathetic bent, by which I mean no brag about my understanding of others. It’s more like being an exposed nerve. I can be prone to getting swept away in the current of others’ emotions, so, to be compassionate, I’ve actually had to learn how to shield myself and tamp down that susceptibility to emotional contagion. People have also remarked on my code-switching and social mirroring, but these often feel less like a skill and more like a survival mechanism, an automatic but protective mimicry. My lack of identification with gender and my tendency to hurl myself headlong into radically different work, housing, and social circumstances also seem to imply a high degree of openness to experience and flexibility. I wonder if all these traits are related. If adjusting and mirroring are inherent to the way my brain functions, and these traits can be generalized to how I respond to animals as well, it might help explain the variation of my animality.
Despite the variability, I’ve never felt lacking a sense of identity altogether, as some people report, and as sometimes appears to be partially responsible for unstable self-concepts. I’ve generally not struggled with feeling like “myself,” and internally there’s fairly strong consistency. After many years of trying to fit a moving target in a static box, I eventually had to accept that my struggle wasn’t the result of uncertainty, or a lack of a sense of self; the shapeshifting is part of who I am and how I function. My shapeshifting is also better thought of as its own distinct way of experiencing animality.
In my dreams, this flexibility is limitless and actually has a physical component. I’ll fly away from trouble on wings, dropping into a canine form at ground level elsewhere. Or I’ll take on the shape of something powerful like a jaguar, lion, or bear to defend myself. Sometimes, I’ll use insect forms or other small creatures for stealth. While it’s often that borrowing these shapes is mostly functional and comes without so much of a change in mentality, the rapid-fire experience of different forms is the most literal experience of shapeshifting. It is also often startlingly vivid. I’ve been many birds, from large raptors and mythological rocs to corvids and grackles. Each shape feels different, distinct. At times, I’m not even choosing a specific form and have to identify it by feel! The rounded heft of a pigeon distinguishes it from the swift dart of a kestrel or the magnitude and steel-cord strength of a golden eagle. I don’t see these dreams as having inherent meaning outside myself; they’re not revealing truths about the universe. Nor do I think they are any kind of memories. But they do have meaning personally; the way dreams manifest and the way I feel about them reflect truths about myself. The experiences are comparable to what I feel while awake, but intensified, and I have used lucid dreaming techniques to further explore what is possible. The physical shapeshifting feels automatic, like my very nature freed from real-world restrictions. Interestingly, in dreams, I am often less likely to take a coyote form if there is any danger. Since the coyote is in a way my core self, I expect dream pursuers to recognize me.
Many of my dreams, though, still feature my actual human body. I experience an appreciable amount of dysphoria about my body and the wrongness of its shape, like many animal people. I do, however, think that to some extent, my acceptance of my human body is improved by the polymorphic nature of my experience. This body is one form I can have; it can still feel like mine to some extent. But the discomfort is two-fold: first, there’s the fact that I feel like my default should be a coyote. Most of the discomfort I feel about my body is because of the incongruity between it and the internal persistent feeling that I should be a medium-sized quadruped with lean legs, fur, and fangs. However, there’s a secondary feeling of being “locked in” to one shape, when maybe, I should be able to slide between them. In dreams this ability is so natural as to be reflexive, an innate involuntary function. So, while having a coyote form to swap into would be amazing, the ideal would be to have limitless fluidity of form.
One tricky aspect of the shapeshifter experience is the difficulty in articulating the experience to others. We lack the language to describe our relationship to different forms - whether they feel like a core experience, a variation on the core, an alternative, or a shift of convenience, and why. Also challenging to describe is how incidental forms can be further integrated and thereby become more meaningful. Identity itself is fluid and sometimes leaning into an experience further solidifies it as part of you. I can try to put these things in plain language, but something is lost, and I often have to rely on analogy. Describing my experiences a bit like the electron cloud model of an atom is sometimes handy. The nucleus and at the center could represent the base of my experience as coyote (or coyote-like Canis / small wolf / whatever we choose to call it). Other canines are the next closest, followed by felines, then other carnivores, and the outer, more rarely-visited reaches include other creatures, often birds. Still, this is only a rough approximation, a useful comparison more than an accurate representation in words. I suppose that’s true of most descriptions of subjective experience. Since I don’t really consider any specific animals besides the coyote consistently central to who I am, I generally express myself in reference to them. It’s a bit of a simplification, since I don’t usually list out other specific animals that are still significant. Ultimately, though, the shapeshifter concept seems to most accurately reflect my experiences without dismissing any of them. In retrospect, it’s clear that community norms and language can be restrictive, even in support-oriented spaces. Everything from rigid terminology to community norms and peer pressure, intentional or not, can be barriers to self-understanding. Often, taking time away from communities or relinquishing a focus on labels can provide more clarity. I may still struggle to explain some of the intricacies of my internal life, but I am more able now to recognize the whole of my experience rather than shying away from it.
Thoughts on Territoriality
Dec. 12th, 2024 03:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
- My territory is a place where I feel safe - this is the very basis of territoriality;
- My surroundings should be familiar and predictable, my territory needs to be marked. Not necessarily in the way you might think, it is enough to scratch things or rub against them, leaving my scent on them, which I recognize very well. My scent makes the territory cozy;
- My territory needs to be protected from strangers, and if this is impossible to do, there is a desire to run away or hide. What to do with this urge - you should decide for yourself;
- It does not matter at all where my territory will be, I will feel comfortable anywhere, as long as the point 1 is observed;
- The size of the territory should be such as to ensure my survival. There is no need for an overly large territory;
- Going beyond your territory is always stressful;
- ...but it can be minimized if there is a person next to me whom I trust enough;
- Not all familiar places are mine, there are also "less mine" territories, where I feel less safe than at home - it is not binary value. I would gladly give them up, if it were not for the need to get food;
- If strange leopards appeared on my territory... I would do everything possible to make sure that they were no longer there. No one from my kintype should live on my territory, except for me and my family. What did you expect? Therianthropy is not worship of a sacred animal, it is about being one. With all its pros and cons.
Dealing With the Food Aggression
Nov. 18th, 2024 04:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Even as child, I almost never ate at the same table with my mother. I usually ate in my room. My feeding usually looked like this: my mother brought me a plate of food (mostly meat), put it on my table and left. If she disturbed me while I was eating, I would always get angry, but until my teenage years I did not allow myself to growl at her, but I took it out on our dog, who learned that when I was eating, it was better not to even look in my direction. If growling didn't save me from my mother, I would simply leave the food and never return to it, as I couldn't calm down for a long time and specific food would start to be associated with stress, which would completely destroy my appetite. However, when the feeding was over, I would become kind again.
Over time, we were able to come to an agreement, although it was quite difficult. From a moral point of view, my behavior was absolutely not beautiful: she got this food for me and brought it to me, and instead of thanking her, I snap at her. But this is the case when human morality is powerless when faced with animal nature: after she gave me food, it is already my food, which she cannot just take back. Condemning a person (or an animal) for something they cannot change only makes things worse. In any case, I don't remember it ever helping.
So, the problem of feeding me at home was solved, but feeding me in public places turned into an even bigger problem. In the school cafeteria, I usually took a place, at a safe distance from the other children, or, if there were no such places, I simply grabbed a bun and ran into the yard to eat it alone. If other children came too close, I got annoyed and either ran away with the food, or ran away leaving the food, or tried to gobble it up as quickly as possible, growling angrily. And since such situations happened almost daily, I ate rather poorly.
When I started regularly communicating with other therians outside the Internet, it was a big discovery for me that they do not have such pronounced food aggression as I do and can eat relatively calmly even near strangers, without experiencing at least too much discomfort. The way they allow their dogs to beg for food from them was completely unthinkable for me: if my dog came close enough to me while I was eating, believe me, it would not want to do it again. By adopting their behavior, I learned to restrain myself quite well, albeit at the cost of colossal stress.
When I went to my first job, the situation became a little better: I just took takeout food from a local cafe, and went outside, hiding in the bushes nearby, and sometimes dragged it up a tree to eat it in a calm environment lying on a tree branch, like a real wild leopard. I can imagine how strange it was: a person in office clothes gnawing on meat lying on a tree branch (good thing people rarely look up). Of course, I didn't growl at my colleagues, I learned to carefully hide it, but the stress and discomfort didn't go away. Yes, I can control the manifestation of my emotions, but I can't control the fact that they arise.
Once, by the will of fate, I had to live in a dormitory. The rules prohibited eating in the rooms and this became a problem again. Usually, I ate in the kitchen at night when everyone was sleeping, or again took food with me outside, or ate in my room secretly, breaking the rules. If my presence at the common table was necessary, I simply avoided eating, saying that I was not hungry. The day before my departure, I (or rather my roommates) were unlucky: the administrator invited me to the common table. I couldn't get out of it and I couldn't hold back, snapping at someone who extended his hand in my direction to take a slice of bread. I remember the frightened faces of my roommates and the administrator's cry, "Alia, what's wrong with you? I don't recognize you." Fortunately, after that we parted ways forever.
After many years of studying and observing this topic, I have come to some conclusions for myself. The level of stress from interference in my eating directly depends on how much I trust the interfering person. We never had a trusting relationship with my mother, and I trusted our dog even less. I don't trust anyone enough, either people or animals. There is only one exception - my cat, whom I perceive as my cub. The trust between us is almost endless: she does not feel discomfort when I disturb her during her meal, and she is allowed to eat from the same plate with me. Although, of course, I try not to give her food that could be harmful to her.
The same goes for the neighbors' cats and dogs, as well as the animals at my work: they don't growl at me, but they clearly show nervousness if I bother them. Some cats can even snatch food from my hands and run away, snapping at other cats - I used to behave exactly the same way at school. Usually they can just run away, dropping the food - no one is ready to fight to the death for food; any predator can be driven away from its prey if it decides that messing with you is more expensive for itself. Picked-up stray cats are especially prone to this, rather than those that grew up at home and are well socialized. I understand their feelings and just don't bother them.
In my case, it also depends on who is "encroaching" on my food: if it is my friend, it is easier for me to cope with my emotions. If it is someone who can pose a danger to me (for example, my boss or a large dog), it will be more difficult for me, but I will restrain myself as much as possible. With people, in general, I will hold back more, but for a small dog in such a situation, safety is not guaranteed - there is no fear factor and there are no moral brakes. Much, however, depends on the subjective value of food: I will gladly share my cookies or chips even with a stranger, but even the closest people are not allowed to touch my meat. Drinks are not perceived as food at all.
There is no need to explain why animals behave like this. In my case, it clearly has similar reasons. But what about humans? I asked ChatGPT, "Is food aggression common in humans?" - and the neural network answered me that... no. However, I remember well how we were instructed when I was getting a job as a waitress that customers should not be disturbed when they are eating unless absolutely necessary, because it is unpleasant for them. Most likely, food aggression does exist in humans, but it is weakly expressed and suppressed by socialization and upbringing. I have been pretty bad with these things since childhood. However, we should not exclude the fact that if the tendency to it is genetically determined, deviations in one direction or another are likely possible within the population.
Is there any way to fix this? Veterinarians I know say that in the case of dogs this can be fixed by training and socialization. In the case of cats, especially those who have not had the proper socialization experience in a cubhood, things are pretty sad: their instinct is too strong and you can only create a situation where such behavior will be minimized. If you also face a similar problem and consider yourself a canine, perhaps you should seek the help of an animal trainer - there is nothing shameful about this, after all, I once even had to receive medical help from a veterinarian.
But since I am not a dog and it is too late to train me, I do not think that a psychologist or animal trainer will help here. Therefore, I solve this problem in this way: I simply avoid eating near other people, preferring to take food with me, eat in my car or at home. If this is not possible and you need to eat in a crowded place, feeding in the presence of a person you trust can help (if, of course, he or she is aware of this). His calmness is transmitted to me and in this case I can eat even at the food court in the mall, albeit sitting with my back to the wall and looking around restlessly.
I do not insist that my solution is universal and will suit absolutely everyone. But we have to admit that the possibilities of (zoo)psychology are not limitless and not everything can be changed. If you can't fix your issue, just try to build your life so that it stops being a problem.
On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home
Dec. 19th, 2023 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home
“This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.”
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I’ve lived a lot of places. Chasing down the next opportunity has meant residing in a variety of biomes - everything from swamp to northern hardwood forest, subtropical islands, eastern deciduous forest, pinyon-juniper, sage steppe, or closed forests, deep and brimming with birdsong, thick with fir scent. I can’t say I’ve ever felt out of place in nature. I love all these ecosystems, each so rich with their own assortment of creatures, plants, and abiotic features. And heck, I’m a coyote; we get along just about anywhere. Even the remnants of natural spaces in cities can be places to get by.
But the wide open places have always called to me. The grasslands, or prairies, as we say in North America, feel like home. I knew even as a teenager where I needed to be, but it took me years before I finally made it back where I belong. The local habitat isn’t always of major significance to people, even animal folk, but for me, much of being animal is in how I relate to the land and other life.
My vision of paradise barely exists anymore. What I love best are lush tallgrass prairies with mixed forests, waves of rippling grass between stands of trees and underbrush. Highly arable, this habitat has largely been turned into farmland, the color and diversity trampled under by monoculture and manifest destiny. The remnants that survive exist along mountainous environments with enough moisture or along the edges of forests - transitional habitat, or ecotone. Luscious, thick grass grows in a patchwork of scrub and woods - oak savannah, scrappy evergreens, riparian refugia dense around the rivers. I savor the wet clean smell of cottonwood leaves and the sway of willows over thick underbrush. Coyote doesn’t exist in a vacuum for me - it exists alongside the plants and animals and natural features that give context to the experience and a sense of belonging.
Edward Abbey speaks of the desert as the sort of place you have to be within to truly appreciate. His estimation applies to the prairie as well. It’s not the sort of landscape you can stand back and absorb from afar. If you’ve ever been on a road trip and heard complaints the land is flat and boring, you know how quickly the enormity of it all is overlooked.
To really experience a grassland, you have to move through it. Go and look, listen, smell, feel. Weave through the tussocks, dodge the spines and brambles. Flip over some rocks, for gods’ sake! Inspect some milkweeds for velvety beetles and striped caterpillars, watch for birds to dart between trees or flee from the brush. If the grass is long enough, you can crouch at any given moment and be invisible. That’s the nature of the prairie - everything hidden right in front of you, if you’ll only go see it for yourself.
The grassland is also home to extremes that are hard to understand without firsthand experience. Rainfall tends to either be copious in a given year or scarce - an average over a period of years won’t tell you much about what the weather actually does. And fire is not just incidental - it’s built in, part of the function of the whole. In any given year, the temperatures reach intense heat and cold, with variations of powerful storms for every season. So the coyote and other denizens of grasslands are hardy, adaptable. Coyote is comfortable being uncomfortable and can roll with the punches.
Winters feature one variation on the storm theme, with wicked cold and ferocious blizzards that still kill people in the 21st century. My picture of winter is snowy skies so cold and grey-white they are continuous with the blanketed ground. Guard hairs grow out to long black-tipped quills, crafting a dark halo against the freeze. That crisply wet smell of snow and the soft silence, the weak, deep-slanted light - the permanent 4pm of the soul. Tiny rodents scuttle beneath the powder, morsels to be pounced and snapped up.
Spring dawdles. Just when you think the days are warming, just when the first tender tips of new grass appear, you’ll wake to a fresh, sodden slump of wet snow. That’s mud season, the time of wet, chilled foot pads and nowhere dry to lay. But one morning, you’ll wake up to a true chorus of birdsong and the vegetal smell of thaw. The warmth starts to come back to the light, and I crave a good sunbath.
Fall tends to skip out early - like spring, it is brief and tumultuous. The cottonwoods glow gold, and any oaks and maple will put on a good show of color (admittedly nothing compared to the true deciduous forests). But it tends not to last - the wind will kick up one day and tear down every leaf as if to say “alright, enough of that.” Sumac flares blood red in the understory, while the fields bleach to mosaics of wheaten blonde, gold, dusty blue-green and bronze. The prairie takes on a thick, faintly sweet scent of sequestered sugars. Dead grass ferments in low spots and leaf potpourri seasons the dust with autumn. Time to carefully pluck cactus fruit from the cactus pads and find ripe pears and apples. My inner perception of myself grows a thick, plush coat and I curse that it’s not a physical reality. I pile soft wool around my throat, a makeshift ruff, while hoods down my back stand in for the thick cape of hackles - a little wolf in sheep’s clothing.
And summer! I’m most nostalgic for summers in the prairie. The extremes of the seasons play out in microcosm every day, particularly in summer. In a grassland, you can tell time by scent. Many mornings, even in summer, start out brisk with the fresh smell of dewy grass and the crispness of transpiration. In a tallgrass prairie, the smell can be grassy the way a lawn is, tinged with sweetgrass and herbal sage, maybe fresh like watermelon rind. In a mixed or short-grass prairie, the smell is increasingly spicy and dusty - the skunky smell of fetid marigold. I can’t help but wonder how many complexities of smell I miss with my weak olfaction. To sniff out the night trails of animals would seem so natural.
Many mornings, almost precisely at dawn, you’ll hear the wild chorus of coyotes. When I’m alone or unlikely to disturb anyone, I sometimes join in. And if there’s a moderate amount of clouds, you’re likely to be treated to some of the best sunrises you will ever see, fire in slow motion burning through every hue from smoky rose to crimson to flame-orange and blaze gold.
Not uncommonly, though, morning is also a gusty time, with steady winds that will tear the breath right out of you. My ears should be furred inside and out, able to be pinned protectively flat. But they aren’t, and I’ve learned the hard way that the wind in bare ears isn’t just annoying - I’ve had an osteolith knocked loose in one of these morning windstorms and had vertigo for two weeks!
By mid-morning, the wind has usually settled, and the moisture deserted. The smells are steady and clear. It’s a good time to feel the sun warm your back before it gets too hot, and to see the last of the more nocturnal wildlife bedding down for the day. This is among the most refreshing time for a good long amble. You might see prehistoric-looking pronghorn gliding smoothly across the ground, or bison with fluffy thundercloud heads. Snakes and lizards warm themselves on stones or open ground, rapidly growing too fast to catch. Summer food, if you’re quick enough - the animal in my brain cues in on any small scampering thing during these sort-coated, lean days.
In afternoon, the heat sets in and wobbles the air above the ground. Sun-baked ground acts like a pizza stone, radiating back blazing heat. You can watch the cumulonimbus clouds build upon themselves all day, blooming and rolling taller as they scud across the skies. By evening they’re crackling fit to burst and hurl down earth-shaking lightning and torrential rain. But many afternoons are simply sunny, hot, abuzz with grasshoppers, and seemingly endless. Now is a good time to seek shade in the dense underbrush or work your way down to streams, rivers, and lakes to slake thirst and sniff around. The mud and vegetation smell of freshwater is proper to me, much moreso than the briny mist of the ocean. Here you might snag a frog, a musky garter snake, a shining trout. The humid air hosts a rainbow fleet of dragonflies. There’s always so much to see around water sources.
Sundown in a grassland can bring the same explosion of colors as a sunrise if there are clouds to catch the fire. Without that cover, the sky will gradually fade to hazy orange and dusty purple. As the colors deepen, the cool breath of plants rises as mist, releasing moist, grassy, crisp scents.
This is when the first stars flicker on in the deep blue portions of the burgeoning night. If you’re lucky, they’ll be mirrored on the ground by the living glow of fireflies. Summer nights as a kid were alive with fireflies, fresh and thoroughly invigorating. I want to feel cool grass under paws and trot at a vigorous pace, refreshed by the night air. The chorus of crickets brings the night alive. I feel I should slip into the darkness, wish my eyes had the tapetum lucidum, that shimmering layer that grants effective night vision. How many more insects and small creatures could I see, smell, hear, and hunt with proper senses?
My mind will sometimes traverse these landscapes in dreams - both familiar and new locales. If I’m really lucky, I’ll even get to explore them in the body my brain thinks I should have. For quite a few years, dreaming was the only time I would get to be in these habitats, as I spent my days in the claustrophobia of cities or closed, skyless deciduous forests. I’ve been able to appreciate so many dramatic landscapes, the sort you can stand back and take in, or simply take a photo to admire. But for me, home will always be deep within those subtler places that must be explored on foot. The mountain announces itself, but the prairie beckons.
The Canine-Person Companion
Dec. 15th, 2023 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Canine-Person Companion
Friendship and relationships for canine people
(This shouldn’t be necessary, but just in case: standard disclaimer here that what’s written here are my perspectives and experiences alone; these words should not be used to confirm or deny your own experiences, validate or delegitimize your own inner animal, denigrate or exalt your relationships, or diagnose or treat any disease. Your mileage may vary. Batteries not included.)
I cannot lay claim to the clear simplicity of dogs’ love. But I think there is at least something of the nature of canine love in the heart of the canine-person.
Both wild canids and dogs are noted for their expressiveness to others, their attachment to mates or close associates, and their devotion. Most wild canids are (generally) monogamous and maintain long-lasting relationships. Domestic dogs are famously faithful.
The expression of affection and love from a human canine, or canine-person, in my experience, bears some similarities. My own feelings about love and affection color the way I form relationships and pose some difficulties for me in navigating standard American culture.
First, there’s the sterility of it, devoid of physical touch. Watch any group of canids and you’ll see much jostling, bumping, pawing, contact always. I crave this kind of interaction - it seems natural to nudge, to lean against, to shoulder or hip-bump in gesture, in greeting, as affection.
There’s nowhere for this feeling to go. It seems to me it should be casual, but it’s not, at least after high school. American culture is mostly bereft of casual contact; the most you might see is a handshake. Oftentimes, touch is seen as sexual. So I tend to walk through most of my life a bit touch-starved, and I have to try to moderate my interactions so that my friendliness isn’t misinterpreted as flirtation.
With friends, there’s often a little flexibility, and many of my closest friends have been the ones willing to play a little rough, verbally or otherwise. Banter and roughhousing have been key to many of my friendships. Some of the good-natured teasing with my closest friends can shock the outside observer. But it’s the verbal equivalent to an inhibited bite, that seemingly vicious but carefully applied play-attack. It’s a show of intimacy and care to demonstrate that you know where the boundary is and won’t cross it. We play rough with each other because we know each other well and love the game. And if occasionally a fanged remark lands awry, all it takes is one whine and a pause to acknowledge the error. Then game on.
With very good friends, there’s also often been physical roughhousing. I’m not terribly fond of organized sports, but a good informal tussle is welcomed, and I’m keen to get back into martial arts eventually. One friend has introduced me to acro-yoga as well, a circus-like and more cooperative type of physical interaction - again, it brings the simple joy of touch with bonding and building of trust. Knowing one another’s strengths and physical trust seem like no-brainers for animals that are often cooperative hunters. But simply being fun-seeking and easily caught in the sympathetic joy of a mutual game also seems to be common among the canine-people I know.
Many of us also seem to have a strong drive toward having a small, stable, and close-knit social group. Of course, this is also often true of humans, but a lot of canine people I know, especially the more wild-animal sort, find casual interaction lacking. A social group is supposed to be more enmeshed than that, symbiotic and reliable. It is a difficult thing to establish after adolescence, unless you’ve got a lot of family around. Many canine people I know tend to crave that connection and miss old friend groups perpetually. Getting dinner every second Tuesday of the month to sit and have polite conversation with work friends doesn’t cut it.
Another commonality seems to be expressiveness. A canine person likes to be unrestrained and unselfconscious in expression - even to the point of silliness. Coyotes are especially known for extreme expressions and gestures. I likewise find myself tending toward gesticulations, postures, and almost Jim Carrey-level facial expressions - the best I can do without a long, fangy muzzle, tall swiveling ears, hackles, and a tail!
Of course, in public, I keep most of it to what I hope is an acceptable level, the same as I do with any kind of physical interaction. I am not often outspoken about being an animal person, but a partner needs to know and be able to accept it - happily, mine is more than just okay with it! And so the full canine assortment of candid affection comes bursting out. I run and leap into my spouse’s waiting arms, showering him with kisses and wiggling with delight in his grasp. He delights in my twitterpated, giddy nuzzles, love bites, and full-body rolling on him. To be able to be so unbridled and demonstrative with my feelings is a great joy and a relief to the frustrations that come with human bodies and expectations.
I am fortunate to have a partner who understands and welcomes my brand of affection - as well as recognizes and isn’t made jealous by displays of affection towards friends. But certainly there are ups and downs to living with a person who is also a wild animal. Like any good dog, I’m emotionally responsive, open, and sensitive. But the neuroses of the wild creature come out in hypervigilance. The tiniest micro expressions in a loved one’s face tend to fill me with anxiety - a superficially blank expression writ with unspoken troubles. I’m rarely wrong, but my keen awareness and concern about other peoples’ state of mind is something I’ve had to consciously learn to manage.
The intensity of a wild animal versus a dog is also apparent to me in the other challenges my partner graciously accepts about living with me. For one, I’m intensely high-energy, a restless, pacing creature. I run three and a half miles almost every morning just trying to burn off enough nervous energy to be able to relax for indoor downtime. The morning solitude also helps with my peculiar need for large amounts of space and alone time. When I’m with my people, they’re my whole focus, but I need to be regularly away from even those I love most. Maybe a wolf would be okay with nearly constant company, and a dog even moreso. But sometimes coyote time means going off by yourself. I intentionally seek a lifestyle that includes regular travel and solo work, which also helps immensely with the wanderlust and need for my own company. In my experience, many people struggle with spouses being absent, so I’m grateful mine recognizes this need and is supportive.
In the home, I can also be a bit of a jumpy wild thing. With only my partner present, my guard is let down a little - he seems to be the only person who can regularly sneak up on me! He’s learned not to touch me if I’m facing away and not expecting it, or pop around a doorway, simultaneously speaking and jumpscare me. We’ve both learned that some feral part of my brain feels frantic if cornered, so I don’t like to be blocked in if I’m in a small room or the corner of the counter. It’s amusing in one sense - that is, that these are almost identical rules to handling rules often taught to handlers of captive canids. But it’s also annoying and feels silly to be so neurotic we have to set guidelines like this. Still, my spouse is happy to comply and very thoughtful about trying to help. I suppose most couples have to work around things that are tough for one another.
For us, another hurdle is sensory difficulties. I can be very sensitive, particularly to sound and smell. Sometimes the world can feel overwhelming and make me want to bolt into the brush. All of these things can be frustrating, but if it bothers him, he doesn’t show it and is compassionate in helping me find solutions.
The hobbies of a scavenger could likewise be a barrier to a relationship. People know canines can be gross. But it takes a special kind of person to be relaxed about their partner and not just their pets bringing dead critters home, eating strange foods, or dumpster diving. I warned my partner about the squirrel I’d stashed in our freezer after scooping up the roadkill on a morning run, smuggling the stiff rodent home bagged up under my hoodie. He barely blinked. Another day in the life, I suppose?
I’m a lucky dog in that my mate not only celebrates all the weird feral quirks I have, but gives back so much of what a canine person would hope for - affection, play, attentiveness, and frank, honest communication. A canine wants a partnership, a teammate who both respects your independence and will support you, share in your joy, and help when you need it. I think canine people tend toward partners that are truly their best friends, and I will be forever fortunate to have that in my marriage. It’s the kind of love that multiplies all joy and more than halves all sorrow. He not only makes my tail wag, but knows and loves that it does.
Homologies
Sep. 29th, 2023 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Homologies
In predawn glow alone, I take off at a brisk trot, floating in diagonal symmetry.
It’s about the closest I can come to peace in my body. Homologies are apparent – and there are many. Vertebrates are all built off the same body plan, the sum of modifications to the same blueprint. Natural selection guides our forms purposefully toward better survival and reproduction, crafting multitudes of shapes. But look closely and it’s recognizable we’re all cut from the same cloth, running on variations of the same foot.
Padded metatarsals. Digitigrade, at least for now.
Bipedalism, still half-baked evolutionarily, feels dissociated from the physical. I want to drop, feel the ground push back, engage my back. Dorso-ventral flattening of the rib cage is all wrong. I’m scrunched and stretched into a size and shape that can feel bizarre. But I’ve done the best I could with it. When the body discomfort peaked, I knew things might never be perfect, but they could be better. So I got fit, as close to the human equivalent of a coyote’s lean-muscled form as possible.
Latissimus dorsi, serratus, obliques, the sleek torso definition of a canid or hominid. Functional strength.
I hit the transition from pavement to packed dirt. Dawn warms the horizon with rosy glow. Liminal space, liminal time, somewhere human and animal. The pond will be frozen soon. My legs power on.
Soleus, gastrocnemius. Achilles tendons springing. Calcaneus, that hammer of civilization that beats ungracefully, ungratefully, on soil dense with death.
My breath floats to frost my hair and neck warmer, that makeshift ruff. I let my jaw open to pull in more air, smelling frost and decay.
Temporalis. But what are they without a sagittal crest as anchor? Rostrum nearly absent, nasals truncated. Canines a bit ironic. Pinnae pitiful.
But the pieces are mostly there. And it’s possible, even with limited hardware, to catch a vole, a whiff of old cottonwood, a rustle of magpies. As I crest the highest ridge, the sun strikes just the treetops. I take it in with eyes lacking the tapetum lucidum, that eye-mirror that would catch more dusky pre-dawn light, but with the cones to appreciate red and orange and peach hues of daybreak. My breath ragged from climb, I pause to savor the instant before treading on.
The path forks and I take the overgrown one littered with detritus. Here the tall grasses ripple along ribcage, and the vegetation is thick even when barren. It’s here we cross paths.
A flash of motion. Slipping through the brush, a wraith in every shade of dust and senescent grass. A pause. Molten gold gaze. Just that moment, and then he’s gone, winding between the blades to become invisible again.
I pad along, striding over familiar roots and ducking overgrown branches. Muscle memory. I know he’s still in the field somewhere, also running, sharing this cursorial lifestyle molded by evolution. But I keep moving. People will be awake soon, and here with their dogs, and we both would like to be gone by then. The sun spreads across the tips of the grass just as I turn back into the neighborhood, back into shadows.
By the time I return, the morning is in full swing. Slowing to a walk, I take a few deep breaths.
I shed down to skin and step inside, civilized enough for now.
The Omnivore’s Opportunity
Sep. 29th, 2023 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Omnivore’s Opportunity
A coyote-person’s experience with food
There’s a stereotype that canines are all stomachs on legs. Barry Lopez wrote that wolves are “more or less always hungry,” being adapted to a feast-or-famine existence and therefore continuously scoping for the next chance to eat. Food is survival.
Coyote hunger comes in that ever-present way, where senses are constantly calibrated to sense danger and opportunity. I’ve been told I’m observant, but really, that sensory sensitivity means the world is just big and loud to me, frequently bordering on overwhelming. On the bright side, it’s a bit funny to spot a miniature peanut butter cup on the ground from a moving car, even if all the movement and traffic are simultaneously making me on edge.
Ubiquitous food in modern America means that the feasting-fasting habits of the wild predator aren’t necessary. But I’ve found it useful to mimic that lifestyle anyway, through intermittent fasting. Long hours in the field for work can feel like the roaming of the local wildlife, and I’ve found myself a little keener, a little more focused, when I’m not snacking. A larger meal at the end of ten or twelve miles in the heat is satisfyingly like finally filling up after a long day on the hunt.
The urge to snap up every opportunity especially didn’t serve me well during grad school. I had to train myself out of taking advantage of every office snack - a world of excess means having to use restraint against the urges that would in other places or times be beneficial. But at least office snacks are pretty socially acceptable things to grab. The scavenging urge also appears in much more literal ways – in restaurants, parking lots, roadsides, dumpsters. To walk past a pristine abandoned basket of naan in an Indian restaurant is difficult, and I’ve nicked some when I can – less so post-pandemic! The sense of all the waste of the world and all the squandered resources creates a real sense of stress in me, one that I can’t explain from any actual food insecurity in my life.
The impulse to take advantage of easy opportunities is sometimes even less socially acceptable. At least once I’ve found myself, pulled over on some rural road, gripping my steering wheel as I have to sit and reason with myself why I can’t take a freshly hit deer. Some of that desire has at least been satisfied in dreams, trotting through grass or the snowy edges of a forest where I’ve sampled long-dead elk, stringy and wind-dried, or hunted rabbits. I even dream vividly enough to feel and taste. In luckier waking circumstances, I’ve been fortunate to be able to salvage smaller roadkill (in accordance with safety protocols and local regulations – after all, a dream carcass is safe to go face-first into, but a real one carries real dangers). And while “freeganism” has caught on somewhat, you’re still likely to raise a few eyebrows by salvaging even the most intact food from a dumpster. That waste-not-want-not philosophy leaks into my lifestyle in general, and I have recovered everything from a charcoal grill to backpacks, aquariums, and shelving units from the trash.
Of course, the scavenging isn’t really the primary strategy of the coyote. Coyotes are predators, and predatory impulses toward things that register as “food” are something I can remember dealing with even as a kid. But the chase and eating drives are somewhat separate even in animals. So it’s possible to satisfy the desire to “hunt” independent of eating – hobbies like insect collection and herping can help with that. Fishing is even better, and while traditional hunting has been somewhat inaccessible to me, a certain amount of vicarious satisfaction comes from hawking with falconer friends. Beating the brush to scare up game is a wonderful way to feel the pleasure of cooperative hunting.
The omnivory of the coyote comes out in gustatory adventurousness as well. There’s little I don’t like and less I won’t try. Generally my objections are more ethical than from squeamishness. Insects, offal, fermented foods, peated whiskeys and sour beers, even exotic things like balut are on the menu. When I do find something that’s offputting, I work on training myself out of the aversion, which has expanded my tastes even further. I’m always on the lookout for something new to try. Learning to take advantage of all the food on offer had the side effect of bolstering my interest in cooking. Trying new techniques, food substitutions, and recipes from around the world is very satisfying to the coyote’s curious stomach.
Though I can’t indulge every feral urge around eating, the modern world is a wonderland of novel resources for the human coyote. Even if I can’t hunt with my own fangs, I can still eat my own catches. I can schedule my eating to feel my best. I have access to many of the coyote’s natural foods. Better yet, I can have those foods off-season and know with some certainty that they’re safe. So, while I do live with challenges around my perceptions and desires around food, there are ways to mitigate the struggles and cultivate a more positive perspective. With care, a coyote can exult in the boundless novelty and opportunity of the human culinary world.
The Gracile Wolf
Sep. 29th, 2023 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
“Coyotes, it turns out, are also a kind of wolf.”
- Dan Flores, Coyote America
gracile (/ˈɡrasəl,ˈɡraˌsīl/): adj. slender, thin in build.
Wolf seemed the obvious answer, as it does for many people. As a preteen, my journal entries started referring to the animal – replacing felines in my mind as the pre-eminent beast. In short, I was a wolfaboo before the phenomenon, let alone the word, existed.
So when I first came across the term “therianthrope” and began to understand that there was a word for the way I felt about myself, that persistent animal self-perception, I didn’t initially think to look any further than the wolf.
It wasn’t too long before I started having doubts. I’d felt more animal than human all my life, playing as and seeing myself in a broad variety of creatures, including wolves. But wolf wasn’t something that had been consistent or really matched my typical “baseline” in some ways. For one, the hulking size and robustness of the wolf didn’t align with my feeling that my body should be lithe and relatively slight. I’d also started to realize that while I’d originally thought group-hunting and sociality were central to my experience of animal, that may have been another idealization. The truth was that I often wanted to be alone, and the animal in my head seemed social but mostly self-reliant.
So I started to consider the red fox. There were certainly some improvements! The sleek, light body, so much smaller. Some climbing ability – almost catlike. That was really appealing to me, since I’d spent so much of my earlier childhood feeling distinctly more cat than dog. I could even remember times embracing fox feelings as a kid. It seemed a proper marriage of feelings old and new, canine and feline. And foxes were not as driven by social structure.
Yet, though I also admired foxes, there was something a bit foreign about them. The body language doesn’t ring true. Their sounds, from the vixen’s woman-like scream to the bizarre fight-sound known as “gekkering”, don’t match up. Foxes don’t even have the facial muscles to lift their lips into a snarl. The deeply omnivorous habits of the fox and its tendency to hunt bite-size critters didn’t really resonate with my hungry desires for anything up to and including bison. And foxes were maybe too solitary.
I was stymied. Here were two animals I’d felt strongly about throughout my life, animals that matched how I felt myself in some ways, animals I’d like to be, that somehow weren’t quite a fit. Most of the animals I’d felt closest to as a kid were even farther from my current self.
Violin voices of a summer night.
I’m picking my way toward the bonfire, electric with wild energy, crossing a ditch across a makeshift bridge. I emerge from the shadows of trees into the clearing and it’s like entering some magical space sequestered from the normal world and bounded by ethereal elements of nature itself.
Fire emanates and crackles.
Have I never heard the coyotes before?
I’d never given much thought to coyotes. I liked them, surely, and I remember touching the pelt at the local nature center with a particular appreciation. But I’d not had any personal experience with them, and besides thinking of them as one of the more appealing of the local fauna, I had no special connection to them. Coyotes seemed kind of mundane, common, with little reverence paid to them - vermin to the locals of my hometown. “Smoke a pack a day,” as the bumper sticker says next to the outline of a coyote. My own mother talked about the ones she saw in California as mangy and scrawny.
But I remember contemplating coyote one night, laying in my bed and trying to envision my body in that form. There was an odd sort of comfort; maybe something clicked. Here was something I hadn’t considered before, something that contained elements of the wolf that still felt so close to a match, as well as the fox that contained some of the other, more delicate features and generalist traits that mirrored my experiences.
“Molded by nature into the perfect combination of fox and wolf, the coyote’s long muzzle and perky ears have enabled it to be a highly efficient mouser, while sharp canid teeth and exceptional speed strike fear in ungulates.” – Todd Wilkinson, “Track of the Coyote”
I didn’t embrace it early on. Wolf had a strong pull, a whole mythology. Foxes and even cats were more appealing. Frankly, I didn’t want to be a coyote. I even remember an older wolf-person on a forum calling them “wannabe wolves.”
I guess the persistence of the coyote pays off. And after all, the coyote is a type of wolf itself.
So what does coyote actually feel like, then? Mark Twain called the coyote “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it,” and that’s the most flattering part of his description!
But, in fairness, there’s a sort of scrappiness. The coyote possesses neither the hefty paws nor the deep keel of the wolf’s chest. The paws are light and long, narrow compared to a dog of the same size. There’s a buoyancy, a lightness that is tangible. Deft and nimble. Without the need for marathon-running ungulates regularly, a coyote doesn’t need the deep chest and huge lungs of the wolf. No, the coyote is streamlined, shallow-chested, narrow through the ribs, so that a coyote resting in the sun can appear to have deflated.
The sleekness follows from tip to tail. A slender muzzle, less square and bulky than a wolf’s. Proportionately long teeth and large eyes, tall, expressive, pointed ears. Thin and leggy, a coyote is often mistaken for underfed.
The energy of a coyote seems to be constantly in tension. When I worked with captive canids, it was always the coyotes I saw up and about during any hours of the day. They’d get up and move around at any time, brightly alert and seeking anything there could be to perceive. I feel that restlessness and alertness like a tightly-wound spring in me. Sprightly, busy, almost frenetic at times – coyote is motion. I joke that my 5-kilometer runs at dawn are what I need to take the edge off and be a less insane person to have to live with. But it’s true that coyote is the antithesis of stagnation.
That high-voltage intensity and comes through in the way the coyote moves, too, not just the amount of motion. A captive coyote requires more extensive fencing than a wolf; in addition to their anti-gravity pogo-stick jumps, they have another bizarre and satisfyingly catlike habit: climbing. Much like the occasional escape artist husky, a coyote can learn to hook its feet in a chain link fence and ladder-climb out. They’re also known to climb trees – maybe not with the dexterity of a red fox, and certainly not with the semi-retractable claws and flexible wrists of the grey fox, but coyotes will still hop and climb, paw over paw, limb by limb, 20 feet or more into a tree for apples or pears.
On the ground, the coyote is a swirl of silver-tawny-cream wind. Coyotes at play are almost ribbonlike, lithe bodies bending and twirling, banner tail-brushes waving. A coyote is light on its feet, the fleet rogue class to the wolf’s sturdy fighter.
As in body, the coyote is flexible in behavior. This plasticity is part of what has made them so successful, even in circumstances where larger and more aggressive predators have failed. Coyote deftly adapts to the situation at hand.
One way that is apparent is socially. The sociality of the wolf is basically compulsory; they are large enough that coordinated hunting of large ungulates is a regular and essentially required part of their schedule. As a result of that, the social group is more rigid, more necessary.
That’s not to say that the coyote isn’t a social creature. In fact, they more or less follow the basic family-group pattern of wolves. But the coyote is socially flexible, and that resonates. Coyote embraces interaction with gesticulation, enthusiasm, exaggerated facial expressions. Reading the room. Code-switching. But when it’s time to go, solitude suits the coyote as well. Loneliness can hurt, but you can flip the narrative and savor it, too.
The coyote is also a mesopredator – that is, a mid-sized carnivore, not the apex, not the all-consuming corner of the food web to which all arrows eventually point. I think ego can get in the way of people seeing mesopredators in themselves – everyone seems to want to think of themselves as top dog. But this evolutionary history as underdogs might be part of the secret to the coyote’s success. Coyote knows how to kill and how to avoid being killed. There’s a tension between threat and opportunity, fear and curiosity, boldness and caution. I often feel my senses are like an exposed nerve in the universe, with narrow thresholds before the input overwhelms. And the startle reflex - hair-trigger, but with quick recovery. It’s important to a coyote to be ready to instantly seize an opportunity or dodge a threat.
That moderate size means a flexible prey base, too. Insects through ungulates all trigger that kind of bunching-muscle predatory eagerness. I remember feeling that way even as a kid, though there’s always been a strange conflict between the desire to chase, even to kill, and the (probably uniquely human) empathy that makes that prospect difficult to consider.
Insect catching and “herping,” the reptile and amphibian enthusiast’s more hands-on equivalent to birding, are useful outlets for those chase impulses. Hunting and fishing are thankfully accessible as well, and the ability to be humane alleviates some of the internal conflict.
While I still continue to have that shapeshifter feeling of experiencing a broad variety of animal feelings – including fox and wolf among many others – coyote continues to be a good representation of the baseline around which my sense of self balances. I feel coyote in all the flexibility and opportunity-seeking in my life. Learning to adapt and be comfortable being uncomfortable for a time is a coyote’s road to success. Coyote is burning curiosity, immune to morbidity or squeamishness, the desire to perceive and experience all there is and to learn from it, good or bad. It is a lot of the things wolf is: gregarious, playful, predatory, intelligent. But coyote is a different sort of wolf – the small, streamlined generalist, the ultimate survivor, the curious and adaptable seeker. Recognition of my inner coyote was a valuable development in knowing myself, and it continues to help me live better.
A very late intro!
Sep. 29th, 2023 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I’m Kiso. I’m a coyote person and what the community calls a “shapeshifter” - ie, my experiences flux around and I experience a variety of animals in addition to the base feeling of coyote. In my case, it’s often other canids (my experiences vary enough that “coyote” is really just the best way to encapsulate the center, but it slides more wolf or fox at times). Sometimes other carnivores - especially felids - show up too, and birds, and more besides.
I’ve been in online therianthrope spaces for over 20 years now, with generally fairly limited engagement. I’m much more interested in hearing about other people’s experiences and in the nature of having a self at all than in meta-discussions about the community itself, terminology, or who does or doesn’t belong.
So I’ve been trying to contribute by putting more out there myself! It’s rather beyond my comfort zone. I really admired all the personal writings I read back in the 00’s but have never felt I could accomplish the same or really had anything valuable to say. But I will try all the same!
I also like to contribute a lot of art - masks, digital art, handcrafted pieces. Art has always been a huge part of my expression and I love sharing that enjoyment with other people.
I spend a lot of time outside both for work and fun, and my relationship with the land is also a big part of being animal for me. I love to hike and camp when I can, I’m a “herper”, and I collect and clean skulls (which I also often provide to other animal people, in true scavenger fashion, haha).
I’m looking forward to dropping writings here as I complete them. I’ve long been happy that this group exists and would love to have my own work included.
Alternatives: Pathfinding
Apr. 20th, 2015 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Animality, or more accurately, human-animality, is such an essential part of who I am: my very life, self, mind, and soul are painted with it and have been that way ever since at least my early childhood. It’s not just therianthropy or being otherkin. It’s not just liking or having a connection to animals or even “animalistic-humanoids”. It’s not a fetish or being a fan. It’s the life-blood of me, and though I can describe aspects of it with certain descriptors and labels, it ultimately goes above and beyond those terms and runs deeper than maybe I have tended to want to admit to myself, let alone others. Why, oh why, have I consistently remained feeling like I am “out of place” or lacking a sense of belonging amongst otherkin, therians, and nonhuman fictionkin (and fictives), seemingly no matter what their ‘type(s) or what they share about their views and experiences? Granted, yes, I’ve felt connection to such people and online communities—I still do—and I genuinely care about members and groups of individuals in such communities as I’ve sympathized and empathized with them, which has led me to offer what efforts, help, and resources I have contributed in the past (at this point) about 10 years. And yet, there remains something major, something fundamental, missing for me that these ‘communities’ have come closer to satisfying than any other people, interests, or communities I’ve come across thus far, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not “enough”. But I don’t even know what “enough” would actually be, let alone how or where to find it, if it even *can* be found.