Don't Let's Start

Tuesday, January 18, 2022 - 7:31 PM

I feel like I should tell Otherkin stories--that is, stories about my own experiences as an Otherkin guy--I already have stories like It Doesn't Matter and New Normal that are literally about Otherkin characters...and that liberally mine from my 'Kin experiences. The trouble is where to start. They're weird stories to talk about, they're hella personal, often pretty out there, and sometimes painful. They're intimate. And that's intimidating!

I guess the most obvious place to start is the beginning, but my own beginning is...pretty out there.

Once upon a time in the late 90s, in a catalog-inspired swirl of wild hope, I reached out with my mind and found a unicorn. We talked mind-to-mind for a while that day, and for a long while after. She told me her name, and that she was a queen of her...and linguistically we're gonna get into the weeds for a second, cuz to me the word that feels most correct is "tribe", but technically a group of unicorns is a glory (or a "blessing"--apparently someone decided fairly recently, cuz Let Me Tell You...! All the literature I grew up with either used "herd", or "glory" if they were being pedantic!). But also, the word "tribe" is a bit loaded in and of itself.

She told me she was queen of her people, anyway, with the implication that that encompassed a broader range of people/unicorns under her purview than actually was. But whatever, I didn't know that at the time, and at 10 I was a bit disinclined to be overly critical of her claims. Maybe slightly wary on occasion. Periodically credulous, perhaps. After all, if what she told me was too good to be believed, or too close to my hopes or expectations, how would I know any of it was real--be it because I was dreaming up the whole thing, or because she was manipulating me? I read a lot, I knew the fairy stories, the trickster stories. It's easier to be taken in by something you want to be true. Even if it's impossible to believe.

So yeah. Eventually she got me to believe. She told me she was a queen, she told me I was a unicorn myself, and she told me I was her son...which was a shock to me at the time, because back then, I still thought I was a girl. Honestly it was easier for me to write off how wrong my body felt, especially as I was going through an early puberty, as because I was actually a unicorn than to look at the fact that I was a boy. Which is pretty funny to look back on, honestly.

Over time, she got me to believe other things, too, without necessarily having to outright say them. She could lead me to the conclusions, and simply verify them as obvious when I arrived where she wanted me to be. Eventually, in addition to being her son, effectively a unicorn prince in my own right, it was also my job, my duty, to save the world--to excise the world of evil, badness, and winter itself in a particularly christian-flavored way, because hey, if you’re indoctrinating someone--like you're a cult leader or something--and they already have all these lovely indoctrinated patterns of groundwork to build on, why not take advantage of it!?

Yeah. I grew up in a pretty seriously evangelical, conservative christian home, I had a ton of terrible patterns that had been drilled into me that made me ripe for the first likely cult-leader who wandered by.

And that's the thing. Mine is far from the only story I've seen like this. Maybe it's more direct than normal. But with our niche beliefs and the somewhat necessary need for discretion/secrecy, Otherkin kids are suuuper easy targets for cults. And calls like this one, to save the world or worlds, often as lone protectors, up against impossible odds but fueled with secret, sacred power we bring to bear against the task...they seem to happen a lot! And of course they hit. That describes most of the canon of grand stories we're likely to have ever seen in our lives.

Of course it strikes true, and of course we take it on, because from our understanding, that's The Way Things Are. And I'm not faulting those stories! Maybe sometimes. A little. Cuz sometimes they get weaponized. Like the "thin blue line" that claims to separate civilization from savagery, when in actuality it enforces an unfair hegemony and literally destroys homeless encampments in freezing weather in the middle of a pandemic. Really saved people from savagery there. Oh no, if not for them people with nowhere else to go would have *checks notes* continued to peacefully live in tents. The horror.

So obviously there's a lot that's unconscionable about this world, and being told that you (even you alone) have the power to fix it is a heady duty...and an onerously heavy burden. Because if you can fix it...shouldn’t you? And how do you need to go about it? Especially if you apparently have some sort of "fix everything forever" ability, or even simply "keep the world from ending" ability, isn't it paramount you exercise it?

Look. You personally do not need to save the world. Quite frankly, alone, you can't. That's not how it works. Yeah, there's a lot to fix, but there's no one thing, or action, or anything that can fix it. I'm not saying the world's not fixable, it very much is. But that will never come from just one person alone. We all can save this place from the cataclysm that's building in the form of climate change and eventual collapse. But it's going to take a lot of working together...and probably demolishment of the few companies (and perhaps industries), that are putting this crushing weight on our world so it can do its part and fucking heal. Probably demolishing capitalism in general. I'm not saying you can't save the world. I'm saying you can't do it alone. I'm saying that the danger is not from an esoteric big bad, but from the interaction of a lot of systems that need to be dramatically changed.

But yeah. I was to eradicate all evil. Apparently. Because that's a salient concept. That's an actionable possibility. It isn't. But hey, I felt the tremendous pressure from both my oppressively religious upbringing and my desire to Do Something And Help.

In between telling me I was her son and leading me to believe it was up to me to excise all evil in the world, Mommy Dearest taught me/forced me to learn how to astral project. It's not something that comes naturally to me, especially then, but she demanded, so learn I did. "Figure it out with minimal guidance," really, but hey. Once it's a thing you can do...

I really don't want to talk about the next part. Needless to say, the thing I tried didn't work. I tried again, and it also didn't work. I was crushed. But hey, what could I expect?

The next part gets...hazy. I was in a really rough place mentally. On top of the dysphoria that was only building, and the pressure from the task I'd been given, I had also grown increasingly socially isolated over the year or so that this built up. While all this had been going on, I'd moved up a grade, and had ended up in a different class from my best friend. I ended up being absolutely hated for my bookwormy, awkward, and admittedly a bit know-it-all ways by the girls in my new class, and the boys were utterly unwilling to put up with the inevitable bullying that hanging out with A Girl, especially A Weird Girl, would bring--so the only person I did almost befriend became one of my biggest bullies. Basically it was the sort of thing I bore well for awhile, but over the months it just ground, and ground, and ground me down, and I didn't have the resilience to bounce it off anymore. Any mention of the bullying or my loneliness to my family was met with the stock utterly unhelpful, "They'll get bored," or, "Just be friendly!" advice, and I obviously couldn't talk about the unicorn stuff to them. So I just...suffered.

The next important point was that the unicorn, who I intentionally haven't mentioned by name here, told me I wasn't her son. Whoops, her mistake, sorry. Sorry for the inconvenience. At first, I accepted this gracefully. Being too worn down and numb to do anything else. I don't have clear memories of that time. I don't know how long it was until it finally sunk in. Or at least, until I finally reacted.

It was Spring Break, and my family was on vacation at a very nice resort. I'd gotten some comic books for the first time (first time since a stint with pneumonia, anyway), and...things just rattled loose.

I spent what felt like hours sobbing absolutely uncontrollably, hiding this fact by swimming in the pool. I galled myself harder with the thought that had always, always as long as I could remember, hurt, "I'm human. I'm human. I'm human..." I swam, and cried, and forced myself to "accept my humanity" until I was too numb to cry anymore.

My family never noticed. Or if they noticed, they said nothing.

And that's the story of my first Awakening. I kept in contact with the unicorn for several years after this, and, obviously, there's more that I didn't mention, and more that happened after. But yeah. That's...where I started, basically.

I'm telling this because, quite frankly, I've never really seen anyone with experiences quite like mine. I've seen Otherkin tell stories with some of the same elements. Soulbonding, being manipulated...chaos, I tentatively want to write an entire essay about the being taken up by cults thing, cuz FUCK, is that a problem!

But part of the reason it's a problem is because if someone does have a trippy-ass, hard to talk about experience, they usually only tell it in the most palatable way. Chaos, I mentioned soulbonding, but I EXTREMELY casually hopped right over the fact that my only friends during the time this took place were cartoon characters I'd made soulbonds with. Which I def reconciled to myself by assuming I'd write another post specifically about soulbonds. Whoops.

So yeah. A Thing I want to do here is carve out a space where I do talk about the weird, hard things. Cuz sometimes. You just are the weird, hard things.

Don't Let's Start - Sonic