Coming to Know Draconity - A Personal Reflection

Malchior Geist

 

How do you come to believe you are a dragon? It sounds like a thing of fantasy or of myth, like a tale spun from a prophecy or a video game. For many people, however, it is reality - and I am among this group of people who identify as dragons. 

 

The short and the long of it begins with this: I have always felt this way, ever since I was a child. However, that isn't a good answer in and of itself. It's true I have always felt that I was something other than human, but I did not instantaneously think of myself as a dragon from the very beginning, and I would be surprised to find anyone who has (though I don't doubt the possibility.)

 

In the beginning, I did think of myself as something - a predatory creature. A monster, of sorts. It's common for young children to play make-believe, but I went so far as to ask others "what kind of animal are you?" and when they replied that they were unsure or that they weren't an animal at all, it confused me. As a kid I assumed everyone felt the same way I did, that everyone around me thought of themselves as a monster or an unusual creature that happened to look like a person.

 

Perhaps I have always felt this way because I grew up around cats - from infancy to present day, my life has been full of cats. Of course, one could therefore argue that the only reason I feel the way I do is because, as a child, I was surrounded by felines and I absorbed some of their traits into my own psychology. Can I say with complete conviction that they're wrong? Absolutely not, but I also don't mind if that does happen to be the reason I feel the way I do about myself. Regardless of how it happened, I have not wavered in how I feel about my identity for the entirety of my lifetime, and whatver the cause might be for how I feel does not matter anymore, because regardless of how it happened, I still feel this way.

 

On the contrary, I am not a feline. Not quite - I do have many feline qualities, but I'm inclined to interpret this as part of my draconity. Housecats, adorable and wonderful as they are, are also not very close to how I feel. If I had been raised by lions, maybe I would connect my draconity back to them more quickly, because lions and tigers and other big cats are closer to the experiences I have.

 

As a kid, I watched The Lion King excessively. I don't mean "a little more than usual," I mean "almost every single day for at least a year." Is that why I feel like a predatory creature? Well, no. I watched this movie all the time not only because I enjoyed it, but because I already associated myself with big cats, so it was like watching a cool movie about myself, or at least about creatures like me. It was a mystery to me why I loved The Lion King so much as a kid until I discovered the otherkin subculture, and once I realized I fit the terminology, it made quite a bit more sense. I had seen myself in the movie, and so I wanted to watch it over and over.

 

But "lion" on its own was never exactly correct. Since childhood, I have experienced supernumerary phantom sensations - claws, large teeth, digitigrade legs, all which were approximately congruent to "lion" - but, more strongly than any other sort of phantom sensation, I experienced wings.

 

Perhaps my wings are the strongest of my phantom sensations because I have nothing similar to them. I feel jaws bigger and larger than my own, but I do have jaws. I feel claws much sharper and longer than my own, but I do have nails. And while the anatomy might be different from the sensations I experience, I can stand on my toes to help my legs fit the shape I feel they should be taking. But aside from a few muscles that winged creatures share with non-winged creatures, I have nothing to help fill the space of where wings should be.

 

I should take a moment to address what exactly these phantom sensations feel like. It's easy to think of them as a result of an overactive imagination, just with anything else related to being nonhuman - but they feel different from things imagined. Anyone can try on imagined sensations. Imagine your legs are a horse's legs - imagine that they feel longer, that they have a higher "knee" and "ankle," that your toes are a hard hoof instead. It's fairly easy to imagine how things would feel on your body. Imagine now that you have bird legs - imagine feathers on your thighs, imagine your legs are long and spindly and that your toes splay out and have a long claw at the end. It's incredibly easy to imagine how body parts unlike your own would feel, and so it's an entirely understandable concern that maybe one's phantom sensations are just a hyperactive imagination doing its work.

 

But these sensations, unlike ones that happen when 'trying on' imaginary body parts, have some unusual characteristics. First, they often appear without conscious effort. Simply walking down the street, standing still, sitting down, thinking about something completely unrelated, and so on - none of these things really affect how and when these sensations will occur. Often, they just plain happen, out of the blue, and are inescapable - I can imagine horse legs over top of the phantom sensations of my dragon legs, but the sensation of these legs will not go away - they'll just be happening at the same time as my imagined horse legs. Second, they feel different. Imagining you have a horse's legs feels exactly thus - it feels like you are imagining your legs are different. But phantom sensations feel like your body is expressing how it should feel, and that your currently existing physical legs are wrong. Pretending you're an animal should feel like you're imagining something, and should not make your body feel like it is wrong, which is what phantom sensations do. These sensations cannot be stopped or altered, and they appear constantly, always the same. Of course this is different depending on who you ask, and someone else might experience these sensations completely differently - but this is how it feels for me.

 

Back to the topic at hand - I'm sure you have gathered that lions, amazing animals though they are, do not have wings.

 

As a small child, I did not really grasp the idea of identity yet. I knew how I felt and I thought everyone felt that way, but I didn't know what identity was. If I had, things may have been easier for me, since looking back on it now I felt both dragon and masculine at a very young age (the whole transgender thing is another writing for another time, but be aware that these feelings did not happen separately or in any sort of orderly fashion - as with almost everyone, my identity occurs to me with all of its facets happening simultaneously. In writing I can sort the different pieces of identity apart, but in experience, there is no such luck - everything happens at the same time, almost always) but I hadn't had a concept or a word to apply these feelings to yet.

 

One thing I remember, though, is Pokemon. I, like a vast majority of kids who grew up in the 90s, was into Pokemon. It was nigh impossible to escape Pokemon completely, because it was everywhere. Cups, food, cereal, clothing, apparel, music, tennis shoes, even airplanes - Pokemon was absolutely everywhere. As a kid, I liked Pokemon, because I liked monsters - but I especially liked Charizard. A cliche favorite, perhaps, but it was my favorite - and I always liked seeing it around, because it reminded me of myself, somehow. Whenever I fancied myself as a Pokemon, because nearly all young children at the time who were into Pokemon did, I fancied myself a Charizard. For the uninformed, Charizard is a large orange dragon-like creature, with a horned head, small clawed arms, a round belly, batlike wings, and a tail ending in fire. Nowadays I don't think I'm much like a Charizard at all, save for maybe 'being a dragonlike creature,' but as a kid, I didn't have the liberty or the knowhow to discern how I felt about myself, and Charizard was pretty close at the time.

 

And then there was the internet.

 

I had access to the internet from a very young age. Neopets, in particular, was my first stomping ground. Neopets had nothing to do with my development as a nonhuman person, but it was my first introduction to the internet - and through Neopets, looking for art of things I like such as both Neopets and Pokemon as one will, I found... furries.

 

The furry subculture is very different from the nonhuman subculture, but it's easy for an outsider to think of the two as similar or the same. Furries like art, writing, music, and so on of anthropomorphic animal creatures and characters; nonhumanism is a form of identity. Not to say, of course, that one cannot be a furry AND a nonhuman at the same time, but the overlap is surprisingly small. But if there is one thing to say about furries, it's this: they are very easy to find. "Furry" is higher on the radar than "otherkin," and more prone to drawings of fictional characters that a small child is interested in, so that was what I came into contact with first.

 

Particularly, I found furries through DeviantArt. I always liked drawing, so the obvious choice was to sign up. I was twelve when I joined, which for the record, is against the terms of conduct, but I either never mentioned my age or no one noticed, so I stayed there for a long time and began participating in the furry subculture as well as beginning to be part of various fandoms for media I enjoyed.

 

I was confused as to why people in the furry subculture did not consider their fursonas - animal avatars used to represent themselves - as who they were. Mine was supposed to be me, didn't everyone else feel the same? No, they did not - many furries have fursonas that might be based on them, but are not actually them. They are often separate characters, and some furries have many fursonas. To me, who did not have a word for myself yet, this was confusing. How could you have many fursonas? It was like having multiple selves, and I didn't understand it at all. I had assumed that the term fursona implied that the creature you were drawing was yourself underneath your skin, not a body to slip into when it came to participating in the furry fandom.

 

At this point, being exposed to dragons in media, I began to think that maybe the way I felt about myself was similar to a dragon. But I didn't match any exact depiction of a dragon in any of the media I had been exposed to, and being in the furry fandom, certain species tend to be depicted with certain traits - and I, as far as I could see, did not match the traits of dragons. I was not "cool enough" to have a dragon fursona, so I interpreted this to mean I myself could not be a dragon. This conclusion stuck to me through a low self esteem and a connection to the furry fandom for years, and took a long time to break out of.

 

So I made myself a winged big cat. At first a cheetah with inverted colors (in that the black and yellow were swapped) and then a lion, both of which always had wings. A few times I tried to somehow retcon being a dragon into my 'backstory,' making my fursona a species related to dragons without being a dragon, for example - and it was close enough to stick for a while.

 

Not much new happened to change how I felt about myself until 2010 came around. Well, not quite - it is more that nothing really related to my draconity occurred. Within this time period I experienced a very severe episode of depression, which, coupled with low self esteem, harassment at school, low grades due to the apathy depression causes, struggling to understand myself, and a realization that the path I had wanted to follow since childhood - veterinary work - was simply not going to happen because of my grades and my extreme disability to do math due to synesthesia, drove me to suicidal thoughts which I very nearly acted upon. During this time the only saving grace I had was video games, an escape from the failure that I interpreted my life to be. I could write a novel on how video games helped save my life, but to shorten it to the absolute minimum, I will say that there is one in particular that helped put me on the right track and that helped me battle depression. And it did affect how I thought of myself, and did affect my identity - but not, perhaps, my draconity. Other facets of myself, yes - but that story is for another time, because if I included it here, it would make this reflection much longer than it needs to be.

 

But yes, 2010 - in this year, I joined Tumblr.

 

There are merits to Tumblr and there are downfalls. Nowadays I do not feel entirely comfortable referring to myself as a Tumblr user, because I do not like the atmosphere of animosity and hostility it has adopted since. But, at the time, it was the cool place to be, a host of hipsters and cool kids and the people who wanted to feel different and who could be different. Everyone, I would argue, is like this to some degree, but that was the sentiment of most of Tumblr back in 2010. A time long gone that I wish would return, but I digress - Tumblr, in all of its oddities, introduced me to a new word: otherkin.

 

At first, the idea of otherkin was... absolutely absurd to me. This was completely due to the way it had been presented to me - from an outside perspective which skewed the reality of it into something that sounded undesirable, unfortunate, and downright ludicrous. It was painted with negativity. After all, otherkin were freaks - freaks that thought of themselves as magical creatures and dogs and elves and who acted like them all the time and couldn't function in human society because of their extreme fantasy. Of course, the only truth in these claims was the fact that otherkin thought of themselves as nonhuman entities, but I didn't know this at the time, and so I, somewhat reluctantly, perhaps because I began to see something of myself in the concept, also considered otherkin too weird to be legitimate.

 

But I followed some otherkin. (On Tumblr, the way you stay up to date with a person's blog is by "following" them, which lets you see their blog posts on your dashboard, which is a feed of all the blogs you follow and their posts.) They began to get more confident in themselves and they started talking more and more about it, and I became more and more amicable to the idea. I do not remember how or when, but it was at some point in 2010 after these encounters that I came to the ultimatum that yes - I fit this term. I am otherkin.

 

Yet another writing for another time is my first experiences in identifying this way, because I was an idiot, no two ways about it. My identity became everything, and I made a huge fool of myself, which is something many new members of the otherkin community are prone to do - finding something that you are able to identify as, especially when you never had a word for it before, can lead you to allow it to encompass and engulf your entire life, which is not very healthy. Eventually I snapped out of it, and, after going through the motions of extreme belief, backlash, extreme disbelief, emotional strain due to denial, I finally leveled out at a more respectable and unobsessive experience.

 

And thus began a learning stage. What I thought I had known about myself had been wrong. The terms the furry fandom had given me were no longer the prime, most applicable terms to what I was. The culture and the attitude of these two subcultures were very different, and I no longer was complacent in how I thought of myself. I was a winged lion, and that had been fine when I was in the furry fandom where different animals tended to have different traits and I wasn't similar enough to a dragon to consider myself one, but now that I was in learning and questioning mode, this was no longer true. I was something else - but I was scared of being a dragon still, thanks to the low self esteem and preconceived notions of what a dragon should be. So for a few years, I struggled.

 

After a while, "dragon" started feeling closer and closer to what I was. But what exactly is a dragon? I remember having a discussion through an IM client with an acquaintence that identified as a dragon, and I mentioned to them that I started feeling more dragonlike after playing Skyrim, which was an experience equatable to the same sort of "seeing myself" that The Lion King brought me as a kid, to which they responded somewhat venomously that those weren't DRAGONS, those were WYVERNS. I got a little more than a little bit indignant over this - they were referred to as dragons, weren't they? That made them dragons, to me. A bit of a variation in morphology from the standard dragon, perhaps, but still dragons nonetheless.

 

So what was a dragon? A chimera - the classical mythos of a chimera, anyways, being a lion, a goat, and a snake merged together, was not a dragon. A turtle monster was not a dragon. There were various serpents which could be considered proper mythological serpents, but maybe not dragons - or maybe they were dragons indeed, depending on who you asked and how they felt.

 

I spent a long time waffling around how I felt about myself, documenting phantom sensations and documenting the things that gave me the sensation of looking at myself. I am lionlike, undoubtedly, but not entirely and exclusively. A bear's paws and claws were closer, but so were a lion's still, and they weren't exact. Batlike wings and birdlike wings alike seemed correct, but neither were exact - it was something of a mixture between the two. The closer and closer I got, the less 'blurry' things felt - when I got closer to how I thought perhaps my claws looked, the phantom sensation felt more and more right, same with wings and tail and jaws. When my ideas on what I might look like were wrong, they didn't give me the feeling of being mine when I looked at them (I often tried to figure these things out by drawing them.) Eventually, I came to a conclusion - I was, undoubtedly, a dragon, and looking back throughout my life, I had always felt like one and never had felt that I was allowed to be one, as foolish as that sounds.

 

And it was foolish, to think that I wasn't allowed to be something I always felt I was all along. The answer I have found to "what is a dragon?" is this - it is a dragon if it feels itself to be a dragon. Sure, visually, the connection tends to be with winged or reptilian or serpentine beings, but truly, a dragon is a dragon if it feels it is a dragon. 'Dragon' is an identity, which a creature may have regardless of how close they may appear to what the traditional idea of a dragon is. And perhaps that is why the draconic community is its own pocket, something that overlaps with the other nonhuman communities but remains distinct - dragon is an identity as well. And like any identity, it is best to look at how one feels before deciding it is true - but when it is there, it is unshakable, incapable of being taken away, as any other identity is.

 

A dragon is a dragon, like I may mention again and again - it is a being comprised of many different parts, but the thing that glues the parts together is draconity, and it is that glue that makes the dragon who and what it is. Draconity is like self - it cannot be described easily if at all, but it can be experienced, and experiencing it is to be a dragon.

 

I can honestly say this - it feels rather absurd to have taken eighteen or so years for me to figure out I was a dragon when I had always felt like one. But such is the nature of identity - it may always be there, but you will have to dig and get dirty in order to find it, hiding under the murky, concealing surface.

 

So I end this reflection with a question posed to you, my reader -

 

Have you dug down into the dirt within you? Have you gotten your feet wet and your hands grimy in your search for what lies beneath?

 

What exactly is hiding under the murky surface of your Self?

 

That is up to you to discover.