by Qarael

When I was young, about eighteen months old if memory serves, I woke up in my bed. Prior to this moment, I had no inkling of existing. I knew nothing of me. I was alone in a room that I had never seen, and when I tumbled out of my little toddler-bed to explore my surroundings, I found people I had never seen. I knew the lady was Mom, and the man was Dad, but I couldn’t remember ever meeting them before that moment. For all I knew, I just popped into the world out of nowhere…

My shift from mindless functioning to full consciousness was sharp, sudden, and extremely confusing. My awakening, in terms of kinship, was no different.

I find myself envious of many people who, when asked about their awakening, say “it just clicked”. I will not assume that their statement means that their awakening was ‘simple’ by any means, as simplicity is relative, and the experience is wholly personal. Still, the idea that it could be so simple hurts me in some way. It was no such thing for me.

The following is an account of my awakening, told to the best of my memory. I hope that with this, I can touch the hearts of people whose awakenings have not been without pain.

I had a rather average childhood and adolescence. Like most Otherkin, I always had a feeling of being “different”, and like most people, I had my fair share of hard times. Still, I was a happy child that grew into an angsty teenager. Average. The only thing that might have set me apart from most people my age was my penchant for spirituality and philosophy. I have always been a very spiritual person. Though not particularly religious, my favourite systems to study have always been those of a Judeo-Christian flavour.

So it’s no wonder that after a few years of looking into neo-paganism and Buddhism, I came back around to study Christianity. I joined a church when I was seventeen, and I loved it there. I attended service every Sunday, went to Bible study every Wednesday, and had regular talks with the minister. I fast became a favourite voice in discussion groups… there was rarely a night I came out of Bible study that I wasn’t stopped by someone and thanked for “breathing new life into the Scripture”. These were people who came from private colleges that required Bible study for graduation, thanking me for my perspective. Insight.

I felt wonderful for being listened to, believed, and appreciated. I felt that, in some way, I was on the right track. But the more I talked, the stranger things became. After group, I would ride around in the countryside with my mother, waxing poetic about spiritual matters. I would get pretty fired up about it, and as I did, I felt a heaviness on my back. I chalked it up to just being tense from getting intense, which worked for a time… until I was baptized and started having visions.

The first vision I had was of a ‘man’ standing at the edge of a burning city. He stood six feet tall, plus a few inches, with dusty blond hair and piercing eyes. His wrists were guarded in gold, and in his left hand was a flaming sword. And wings. Beautiful wings of the palest blue. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the city burned because of him. And that I was him.

I had been told by people before that something about me was… off. Yes, I do mean to say that I have been told, outright, that my soul is not human. While I thought the idea was cool, I figured these people were either pulling my chain or on some kind of substance. I may have been into witchcraft, grown up in a psychically gifted family, seen ghosts and all sorts of wild things, but the idea that I wasn’t entirely human was just too strange for my liking. But now, with these visions that feel like memories and this heavy feeling of what just-might-be-wings on my back, I had reason to believe what these people had told me was true. And I fought hard to reject it. So hard, in fact, that my firm grip on reality crumbled into a weak finger-hold. I couldn’t recognize places I had seen countless times, consumed by the feeling that I should be somewhere else. I couldn’t recognize voices from people I had known all my life. I started to doubt that these people were even real: only imagined in some dream I was trapped in. I felt that my entire life was a lie; a dream that had just turned into a total nightmare. And as the weight on my back became constant, and the visions came more regularly, I tried to wake up from it all. But every time I woke from my sleep, I found myself right back in a house I couldn’t call home. And it hurt. And I ached. My mind, my heart, my everything screamed against the blackness of confusion. I had gone mad… there was no other explanation for it. The cheese must’ve slipped off the cracker when I wasn’t looking, because while thinking you could be an angel is bad, disassociation is even worse.

After months of my mind screaming into silence, something stirred inside me. To this day, I do not know what it was, but I stopped fighting. The pain was totally unnecessary, and if I wanted it to cease, I had to stop hiding from myself. I accepted my difference and finally felt at peace. I also said my goodbyes to the Church, somehow knowing that I had to leave the dogma behind to truly find myself. The heaviness on my back felt lighter – still present, but less burdensome. And, what I would like to think of as a sort of reward for the eventual acceptance of my inner self, I had another series of visions: memories of Heaven, and those silvery reflecting pools I loved so much in my past.

All these things I discovered about myself were kept silent. I knew no one else that didn’t feel completely human, much less felt that they were an angel. I worried that people would think I had just gone completely nuts, and I couldn’t blame them for it… for a few months – the longest few-months of my life – even I thought I had went irrevocably mad. So I held on to my secret for five long years, until I happened to hear about Otherkin.

There were no answers or explanations for me. There were no shoulders to lean on, no people to learn from, and no community to help me make sense of what I was feeling. My awakening was a terrifying and lonely process. If I had known then that I was not alone, things may have went easier. Maybe it would’ve ‘just clicked’… still hard, but more bearable. My awakening was hard, and maybe yours is to, but I say to you, it doesn’t have to be. And you are not alone. If you are here reading this, you are not alone.