Being alterhuman.

Once upon a time, I was actually very anti-alterhuman. Oh, how times have changed.

In hindsight, the reason I was so against the notion is because I was desperately trying to convince myself that I was completely human and had no divergence to me. As you might've guessed from this website, I was wrong.

My journey into alterhumanity began on Tumblr in the 2010s. I did not relate to it at all at that time, merely observed it from afar since I was a resident of Tumblr and it existed all over the site. I wouldn't look into alterhumanity as a thing that applied to me until 2019. I am a pantheist pagan and eclectic witch (have been since 2009) and I'd begun drifting into witchy and pagan Discords, searching for community (since I was largely a solo practitioner.) I met a horse therian and a dragonkin in one of those servers, and I watched them for a while. They were both very knowledgable and helpful, and I found myself intrigued. My experience with alterhumans to that point had been largely negative, so to see nonhumans that I felt I could relate to caught my attention. The therian ran a small, highly vetted server for nonhumans and one day I got curious enough to ask if I could join and be an observer, so I could learn more about the nonhuman community. He let me in. I watched for a little bit, then I began doing my own research into nonhumanity. One thing led to another and I found information that struck me as extremely relatable to my situation. By this point I had been representing myself as a manticore that bore my human face for a couple years. While I would eventually conclude this sona was a copinglink, I mistook it for an otherkin identity and began talking to my therian friend at length about what it means to be nonhuman and how one might go about figuring out they were. We talked about a lot of things, but the thing that finally made me realize I was nonhuman was the fact that I had experienced phantom limb pain and discomfort, and had been for years. I'd always described it to myself as "like wings are trying to break out of my back."

For the sake of brevity, I won't go into ALL the soul-searching, introspection, and research I did, but I will say this: I concluded that I was dragonkin a few months after beginning the process of discovery, when I did a meditative journey into the astral and willed my body to take the form that felt most natural to it at the time. I turned into a black dragon, and it was the most "right" I'd felt since I'd realized my dreams of the "blond-haired man" had actually been me seeing my ideal self before I realized I was trans.

This is where I stayed for almost two years. I decided to interact more with the alterhuman community and joined forums, and talked about it in Discord servers. My prejudices towards the community melted away as I realized how much better it felt to accept myself. Eventually, though, I realized I was still missing something. I began the journey again, eventually leading myself to realize one part of myself I'd always seen as part of my "human side" was not actually human, but human enough to pass when I didn't look too closely. That was when I realized my elven self existed, and was soul-bonded to my draconic self. Through deep introspection and meditative journeying, I came to understand that they'd existed together in their previous lives and died together, their energy mixing with what would become my soul and making me. I won't get too deep into this subject, as that has it's own section: "On Being Multi-Faceted."

Nonhumanity is a very spiritual experience for me, it is something I feel in my soul and mind together. I feel like my nonhumanity is an integral part in how I experience the world, and when I was blind to it or denying it I was making myself miserable. Since discovering I am nonhuman, I've integrated it either secretly or publicly into several areas of my life, namely my witchcraft practice and how I approach my mental health.

During my journey to understand my alterhumanity, I would come to drop the manticore copinglink in favor of a c'link based on my "kintypes" (which I now refer to as facets.) These days that copinglink has become my primary sona instead, the way I choose to present myself in online and creative spaces. In 2022, in an effort to better cope with my intense body dysphoria, I created a new copinglink: the werewolf. The werewolf (who shares my name) was the first time I'd endeavored to draw myself more accurate to how my physical body looks since 2014. It was my way of making peace with my bigger frame, my body hair, my general incongruence with how I saw my elven selves and draconic self in my mind and in the astral. It has helped ease the burden of my dysphoria.

In 2022 I would also discover that what I had been interpreting as a dragon and elf were actually aliens who merely resembled what one might consider a dragon and an elf. This explained why I could never place where they came from for a long time, other than somewhere cold and arctic-like, but not Earth's Arctic Circle. For ease of understanding, however, I still refer to them as a dragon and an elf, because that invokes an image in most peoples' minds that is "close enough."

That brings us to the present in terms of nonhumanity. In order to continue this story to it's most recent chapter, I would recommend checking out the section "On Being Multi-Faceted."