by Twitch

It occurs to me that I’m in an interesting position. I’m a non-kin, but with all the symptoms of kinness. I’ve felt out of place most of my life, I’ve been able to ‘feel’ phantom limbs that I do not have, I’ve known that I was not like everyone else for most of my life… But I’m human, though and through.

So, why don’t I call myself “Otherkin”, “Therian”, or something else? Or, conversely, why am I not called that by others? What’s the defining point? It cannot be the psychophysical manifestations (the phantom limbs) because I have felt a large variety of them in my time. It cannot be the “out of place”ness that pervades much of the otherkin community, because that’s common enough among normal humans, especially in their adolescence.

What do I have different than kin? Soul. Call it what you will; spirit, aura, energy, psychological basis, mental methodology or phenotype… but my mind is that of a human, my thought patterns do not include the patterns of anything other than human… Unlike those of a kin, who have not only the mental abilities of a human but the thought patterns of another type of being.

That’s what makes you different than me. But that difference is not all that great; many humans have greater differences because of culture, language, upbringing and experience than we do because of mental phenotype.
So why do we care about our mental phenotypes? What does it matter, if the differences due to other things are greater than the differences due to kinness?

It’s simple; it has nothing to do with other people. You should learn what you can about yourself. Learning how your mind works, how your soul fits, who you are… These are all valuable. Comparing yourself to others however, is not very useful at all, because the things that make you different are not always the things that others display, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. In the end, what matters is that you know you.