Contherianthrope
I’ve been meaning to write this for about a week now. I tried before, but it devolved into a personal ramble that wasn’t terribly suitable for reading.
I guess there’s no really easy way of saying I was introduced to the idea of therianthropy without it sounding like I talked myself into it, so I’ll skip that part of the story and get straight to the part where I believed myself to be a therian after some soul-searching and bumbling attempts at figuring myself out (I’ve never been good at meditation, and unfortunately don’t know anyone who could teach me the concept face-to-face, much as I think such an activity would help).
I feel very, very connected to foxes, arctic ones in particular, and while I don’t buy into the idea of predestination, I do think we all have a purpose for being here, and that through subtle, sometimes seemingly unrelated actions by us and those around us, we are guided towards a better understanding of ourselves and our purpose. Interestingly enough, almost all of the things that have led me to where I am now, in terms of who I am, what I want to do, where I want to go, and who I want to be with have spawned initially from my involvement in the Myst community. It was through that that I found Real Life comics, then hosted on Keenspace, which led me to another once-Keenspace comic, Ozy and Millie, which in a roundabout, investigating the characters’ species kind of way, awoke my feelings of connection with foxes.
This, in turn, culminated in July of 2002 at Mysterium, where a friend I was rooming with that weekend gave me a nudge towards were.net based on what I had said to her and how I’d behaved that weekend. That triggered my investigation into therianthropy and “were-ism”, which as I said earlier, I later accepted as a label for what I already was (there, found a good way of putting it). However, I’ve always doubted myself about whether I really am what I think I am… I mean, I’ve never shifted in any really perceptible way, and so I lack a lot of the rather vivid stories told by a number of the other people in the community that has arrisen online. This lack of shifting has often been the largest contributor to my doubt, for while I can very much identify with the idea, and can sometimes be described as being in a more animalistic mood than normal, I’ve never really all-out shifted. If anything I’ve only ever had faint phantom shifts, but that’s about it. Since shifting was, as far as I had investigated, something of a requirement in order to really be able to call yourself a therian, I was always waiting, even hoping, for a serious shift to validate my belief.
Also about a week ago, perhaps two weeks by now, I found a new webcomic (again hosted on Keenspace… will my association with that hosting service never end?) called “Black Tapestries”, which was created by a woman named Jakkal, who just so happens to be a therian. She also runs a therianthropy website and forum with her husband (also a therian), which I’ve been poking around since I found it. I’ve always been hesitant to introduce myself to other therians and ask for guidance on how to better investigate myself, perhaps partly because I don’t want to find out I’m wrong about myself, and partly because these people don’t take kindly to posers and actors, and I fear they may think that I am if I don’t introduce myself properly. Anyway, I was investigating the site and the forum and came across a definition for and a discussion about “contherianthropy”, which is the term used to describe people who are therian but do not experience shifts, because they are always 100% human and animal at the same time, they just slide along a scale between the two. To put it lightly, this was a bit of an epiphany, as well as a relief, to find out that there were other people out there like myself, with similar experiences as myself, who still fit the bill of being therian. This has largely expelled a lot of the doubt that I’ve been lying to myself for the past three years, and while I’m still not (and perhaps never will be) 100% sure of myself in this area, I do feel a lot more comfortable with the label I’ve placed upon myself for the first time in a while. I should clarify that while desperately trying to peg myself as a therian by any means possible is not what I’m trying to do, it is comforting to know that I do still share common ground with others who call themselves therian, and feel that it goes some way toward validating my thoughts on the matter. Basically, it’s good to know I’m not crazy in that there are others around that have experiences like mine, and it’s also good to know that I’m not deluding myself by attempting to apply a label to myself that doesn’t fit.
It’s always been difficult describing exactly what my relationship is with my animal “side”, largely because it really isn’t a side, it’s just part of who I am. I’ve named it, and taken to drawing it in an effort to express it, and while these efforts have been successful in illuminating the fact that I do in fact have that part of me inside, it perhaps hasn’t been the best depiction of the actual relationship. It’s odd, being two things at once… a human in mind and body but an animal in spirit. It’s a hard thing to understand, and an even harder thing to properly explain (which contributes to other people not understanding it as well). It’s something I don’t feel comfortable discussing with my family, or even any of my RL friends, because I don’t think they would accept it as anything other than a mental condition (*sigh*) or at best a bad/weird joke, and so I’m fairly limited in who I can turn to IRL for help in exploring myself to better understand this. And while online contacts have gotten me this far, they can’t refer me to anyone locally who might be able to help me learn meditation methods and the like, so I feel like I’ve sort of hit a wall in terms of what I can do to better my understanding of and connection with myself, which aggrivates and saddens me at the same time.
So, the long and the short of it is that I feel more confident about myself and what I think I am now than I was for some time now, which is good, because I need all the personal self-esteem I can get with all the stuff I’m doing and trying to do these days. I also don’t like doubting myself about decisions I’ve made regarding who I am, so being able to again identify with the idea that I’m therian without having to delude myself into thinking it or warp the definition of the word to fit myself is a good thing overall, as it means I’m not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, I’m not trying to identify with something that I’m actually not, and I’m liable to be better accepted should I ever get over my fear and my shyness and toss myself into the therian community Jakkal is running (they seem a nice group, just not the types you want to piss off).