On therianthropy and plurality
This entry was originally posted on Cohost, and has been migrated here in light of their shutdown.
When I was a lot younger, I was trying to figure out my identity.
Growing up in the 80s and being a teenager in the 90s was an awful time to be trans, and even though I definitely had gender feels going back early in my childhood (like, recently I remembered thinking about it when I was 7, and really into The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle), the environment simply wasn’t supportive back then. I got bullied for being a “sissy” and a “girl” a lot.
I was also very much into transformation-related fiction (uh, like The Last Unicorn) and along the way I decided that it would actually be easier to be an animal. This of course led directly to my later descent into furry trash.
When I was around 15 I started to find a great deal of affinity for porcupines. This eventually led to me believing I was literally a porcupine in a human body. Back then, there weren’t places that you could talk about this; the Internet was just starting to open up to the general public and it was still a place where you went for Serious Discussions on Serious Research and the like. The furry fandom technically existed in a nascent form but it certainly wasn’t part of the collective consciousness. I wouldn’t find out about it until 1995, when I’d started college and was looking for other spiritually-a-porcupine folks online, and that led me to FurryMUCK (which I finally joined in 1996).
Anyway. This identity was predicated on a lot of things, and was a comforting place to reside when I was under a lot of stress. Trying to reconcile certain things also led to a schism in my headspace, and for a brief time I was what would now be called a plural system. And, again, there was little-to-no support for that online, and I was suffering for it. I reintegrated, and I feel that this was the best thing for me, and I’m kind of glad that there wasn’t the kind of support for plurality as there is now, because having torn myself apart into little tiny fragments was definitely not healthy for me. (Which isn’t to say it isn’t good for others! These days I think that plurality is a spectrum and there’s different levels of integration that make sense for different folks. But a lot of what led me down the path of plurality later turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD, for what it’s worth.)
Reintegrating actually strengthened my therianthropy, and I started to express it wherever I felt safe to, and sometimes pushed boundaries into where it wasn’t safe. This led to many issues in my personal life. But, again, the environment and culture were vastly different back then.
When I was telling other furries about my literally-an-animal identity, I was often told from others that they felt that way too but they “outgrew it.” Like it was some sort of immaturity and unwillingness to accept reality.
These days I don’t feel that I outgrew it, so much as I grew apart from it. My fursona changed and drifted over time and eventually transmuted into the generic-furry-critter-with-weird-materials-and-patterns that it is today. But there’s still some porcupine in it.
I can still feel my phantom quills and tail when I want to, even though I no longer believe myself to be one, spiritually-speaking. Neuroplasticity is an amazing thing.
For a while I did try to convince others who I felt were on the same path as me to maybe accelerate their development along it, but that’s changed. Doing that clearly brought a lot of discomfort to others, and some of it seemed like the same discomfort I felt when others tried to do the same to me. I feel like pushing through the discomfort was helpful for me, ultimately, but it’s not my job to inflict that on others, and it’s not necessarily the case that it’s right for any of them; heck, it’s not entirely clear to me that it was right for me. It’s just how my life worked out, and what feels like has been the path I needed to take. But it’s not as if my life has been amazing separated from all that.
Around a year ago I did a series of ketamine treatments to try to treat my fibromyalgia, and while it didn’t help with the fibro, it did help me to process a lot of deep-seated trauma, and in particular it also helped me to recognize that what I see as “objective” reality is also quite fragile, and that there are very different subjective realities. Who’s to say which one is correct? I’ve had my feet in more than one simultaneously. The median experience isn’t necessarily the correct one.
Anyway, it’s with all this in mind that I started my guided-meditation podcast; it started out as a hypno-kink joke for eevee’s game jam but grew into something much greater.
So far there are three episodes recorded (two for the jam, a third one coming tomorrow for the podcast version). I hope you will check them out.
In the third one, you are a porcupine.