Identity thoughts
4/16/25
I have always been... different.
It wasn't until I got older than I realized I was more different than I thought. I had the privilege of going to a "hippie granola" (as my fiancee likes to say) private school during the identity-forming middle school years while my mom worked there. From 5th-8th grade, I was surrounded by other "weird" kids (in fact, most of the classmates I went to middle school with are transgender now if we include me. Like, over half). Adults around the school were sometimes shittier than their kids, but still most adults were on the weird themselves-- Pagans, gays, philosophy majors. Once I hit high school, I realized I was a little different. I didn't always fit in at the hippie school, let alone a public high school.
I still didn't really think about it. I wasn't really bullied by anyone; I was kind, helpful during group projects, and didn't really interact with people significantly outside of my small friend group, so I was pretty inoffensive despite beign trapped in a building with other teenagers for 8 hours a day. I didn't really feel different, but I fit in better with people who, unbeknownst to most of us at the time, were queer and/or neurodivergent. My best friend in high school (and to this day) is a ND, two spirit Indigenous person, who was basically mute until sophomore year, and we never talked until we sat together on a trip and talked about Italian rap. All of my current friends are queer except for two, and one whose sexuality is best described from an outside perspective as "complicated".
All that to say, my and my friends were kind of the weird ones, even if we didn't feel super weird. I've always been one of the weird ones, it's just that my ambient surroundings are also kind of weird. As an adult, I've become more aware of "being weird". You would think that I would perceive a difference from the norm more accutely, but I've also always been a little clueless. As an adult, sometimes I wonder how I manage to fit in. As a queer person, a ND person, among other things. But, people LIKE me, which is what matters, I think. I like myself (almost all of the time), which is what matters more.
When I started college, my partner opened my eyes to differences in my perception of gender. I never realized that women were joking about wanting to be boys when they were on their period, I just assumed everyone felt that way. I thought maybe I was nonbinary, so that's what I went with. I started using they/them pronouns online and with my partner. Slowly the he/him pronouns crept in, and I decided I liked those more and more. Years later, I have become more explicitly transmasc. Asking The Question of "what would you want if there were no societal expectations and you were alone on a deserted island?" I would answer "I would want to be a guy". I got older, freer. I cut my hair and kept cutting it. I put on masculine button ups and hang my carabiner with my keys on the right side of my body. I cut my own hair if I needed to (hairstylists love me... NOT). I bought men's clothing, refused to wear a purse, and started using more and more masculine products. I changed my name. I grew into myself as much as I would allow it.
I think my identity is mixed a lot with my neurodivergence. I am diagnosed with ADHD and likely to be autistic (I know a lot of people say that, but I think it's ok to self diagnose; we live in a world that is unkind to anyone who is not a straight white male). I think that led to me realizing later than I might have otherwise. I don't know if I would have the unique perception of self and others that informs my whole identity without being ND. I know a lot of ND people are also queer or have other identities that might be considered outside the realm of "normal". I think this informs the mismatch between my external appearance and my internal sense of self, which has always been different from my external appearance. I have poor proprioception (the sense that tells your brain about where your body is in space) and poor internal awareness (whatever that's called). I have a hard time understanding my emotions and connecting to internal sensations. I think that leads to mismatches between my internal and external world, in many ways even beyond gender. Being ND also gives me a unique world view, and I think that also inspires some fundamental differences in my identity.
There are some other facets of my identity that I understand even less than my gender or sexuality. Perhaps more closely involved with being ND than my sexuality or gender is a sense of nonhuman-ness, sometimes accompanied with a feeling of alienation from other people (which is not unfamiliar to me as a queer person either). I have had dreams of being a dragon, felt a muzzle on my face when I woke up, and have fallen asleep feeling a sense of other parts of my body beyond what is really there. Sometimes my headspace is very different than other times, not really in a DID way or anything, but more in a feeling where I have shifted slightly into a different type of internal space. Sometimes this space is playful or small, other times it is more aggressive.
As a kid, one of my favorite games was "Zombies", which is a game where one person starts as "it", and when someone is tagged they are also it. Eventually, you have a horde of people chasing the remaining people who are not it. I loved the thrill of the chase, cornering other people with my fellow "zombies", I loved scoring a difficult tag or wearing down an opponent with my persistance. On the other side, I loved outrunning people, dodging, successfully creating space between me and the growing horde. I liked the fast moments and I liked the careful moments of locking onto someone specific and figuring out how to best take them down. The more aggressive headspace is not dissimilar to those feelings; something I can only really compare to a prey drive or a desire to hunt. The aggressive headspace is cloudy and restless, with a desire (for lack of a better word, maybe more of a sense?) to stake claims and make big moves. It's a more powerful headspace than my normal, neutral space. Sometimes in that space it's more of an "I'm the aggressor" feeling, and sometimes it's more of a noble protector feeling. My less aggressive, softer, playful space is like an unbridled desire to play and interact, usually only around my partner (although I enter a different headspace from my neutral one when around very close friends and sometimes at concerts, but I don't know if that's related). This is a more caring headspace, a desire to strengthen a bond and be close. I have a similar feeling outside of that space, but this is slightly different, and I couldn't quite explain why. I would say both of these changes in headspace, aggressive or playful, feel more basal, more vital, primal, or more instinctual. It's hard to explain what's different.
Going back to the beginning of the last paragraph about the dreams of being a dragon: I turned that dragon into my fursona. I suppose being a furry is part of my identity. That probably has roots in my internal mismatch of appearance. People make characters to feel good, to create positive perceptions of their traits or soothe and rewrite difficult experiences. I'm no exception. My fursona is not a truesona, but is based on me. He was created mainly from the designs of the dragon I was in my dreams, but has been expanded over the years to suit the person I have become. Other characters have bits of me in them too.
The other thing is: how did I feel a muzzle on my face? I've never had a muzzle before. It was so real, it was very strange. It was soothing at the same time though. I have come to understand that this experience is something familiar to therians, or I guess in a dragon's case, otherkin. I don't consider myself a part of that community, but the community has older roots in online forums of people who believed they were "weres"; werewolves, werebats, etc. A relatively older term is draconic or dragonhearted, and I align with those more closely. According to therians, there are "shifts", which I have read can include "dream shifts". If anything more than a strong subconscious experience, I guess it would have been that. Mental "shifts" are also a thing, which could explain the occasional changes in my headspace that seem like "not me" or at least not "human me". But, I think this is mostly a positive experience for me. I don't really wish to become an animal, although I think if there were cybernetics or something, I would consider tail or horn or other animalistic options. I like being a human even though I don't always feel like one or don't feel like part of wider human society, and I like humans in general (I mean, I got an anthropology degree). I wonder about other animalistic sides of me, and I think other than the dragon one, I've always experienced a deep kinship with dogs/canines. I understand them. My sense of hearing and smell are acute (possibly an autism sensory thing). There is a feeling of brotherhood with canines that I don't experience with other animals. On a side note, I think canines are common in therian communities and furry communities because we have evolved along side of us, so more people have close experiences with canines and can see a lot of human feeling in how they live and react to situations. (that's another post for another day though)
I don't really delve very deep into the therian/otherkin thing. I have people in my online sphere who are therian, and I have known dragonkin in real life. As a queer person, I have mixed feelings about the concept of "species dysphoria", although I believe that dysphoria is just a word to describe a mismatched sense of self. If the experience aligns with dysphoria, then who am I to say differently? "Transspecies" is still difficult for me to understand, despite being transgender, but I'm not going to tell someone how to live. All that to say that I don't experience that feeling on a species level. Sometimes I wish I was one thing or another, but I don't feel it as deeply as I think a lot of people who align with that experience do. I feel gender dysphoria much more acutely, but it's not always "active" for lack of a better word. Sometimes I feel more or less comfortable in my body, and other times I feel really dysphoric. I don't have any memories of a past life, I don't lucid dream, I don't really feel anything when I'm awake that would indicate anything other than being in a human body.
When I see therians online, they seem to have all these phantom limbs and mental shifts all the time. Hell, I knew someone who kinned an alien species and had a sensitive vagina on their back. If we're getting really out there with identities, I knew someone who married a Hapsburg (yes, the inbred one) on the astral plane and had astral babies with him that lived in her doll collection (too bad she was also racist) (and I couldn't make this shit up if I tried). The range of human experience is appalling to someone who does not share the more "out there" experiences. As an anthropologist, I am aware of the vastness of human experience and culture. But, it's still "odd" to be queer, or an animal, or gay, or a witch or whatever. As for myself, the identities are still blurry. You would think that, instead of these feelings getting stronger with age, that they would go away as I grew out of them. Perhaps adult life is just more stressful than being a child, or maybe being an adult is being more self aware, more aware of your place in the world and your interactions with others.
Everything above to say that: I am me. Uniquely me, only me. Loved for who I am, by myself and by others. I am a trans person, with an open mind, possibly an animal, neurodivergent, and aligned with a deep sense of draconity. I'm not very normal, and I'm alright with that. If everyone wrote expose about their identity or their interests we would find that everyone has something weird going on, whether they're going to be on the reboot of Taboo or My Strange Addiction, or just politely collect funny tea towels or something.
If you made it to the end of this, congrats. It was long, rambly, and train of thought-ish. Not my finest work, but it wasn't ever supposed to be. If you made it to the end of this, I'm also curious to know how you got here.