Whatever you wanna do! It’s completely fine to just chill and hang out, there’s no pressure to “do” anything

But if you want to do something for the community… writings are ALWAYS appreciated. We always need more essays, experience descriptions, shift logs, and awakening stories. Even if you don’t think you’re a good writer, or you think your experiences are already overrepresented on the community, I promise someone out there will get something out of it. Check out the Alterhuman Archive for ideas if you don’t know what to write, it currently holds over 1000 essays and poems and 101s and so on :)

Going back to basics might be nice - you could pretend you’re writing an introductory essay for an old school forum. Just writing out your entire experience, why you’re otherkin, how you’re otherkin, what it means to you, how it affects your life, what it pushes you to do, how you act based on it, etc.

The main thing I do is tending my e-shrine. Mostly because it’s the only thing I have the spoons to do. Other than that, I ask them for help and listen to their signs, and that’s about it. I haven’t had the energy or mental space to practice in a long time.

Here’s what I’ve written about the primary deities so far

I only have very vague noemata of the rest of the gnollish myths, heroes, spirits, and rituals. Too vague to put into words. I’m not sure we have other gods then those three, but I know we have mythological heroes, akin to Heracles or Völsung - their stories are a part of our mythology, but they aren’t worshiped.

Simile: Explained in the last third of this essay

Eclipse shift: Discussed in the notes here and here

Paratype: Discussed in this tag and tentatively defined in this post

Flashalong: Made up on a whim in my fictionkind essay. Specifically in this paragraph:
“I’m not consciously aware of every waking moment of my parallel selves. When I say I "know” what they’re doing, it’s less that their thoughts and actions are beamed into my brain 24/7, and more that I can at any moment sit down, breathe, let my mind go blank, and view their world through their eyes. Like I’m possessing their bodies (though, again, my present self is not in control – my alternate selves are). Even if I don’t intend to, I often end up “possessing” them during quiet moments – when I’m about to fall asleep, when I’m in transit, when I’m cleaning, and so on. What happens during quiet moments is rarely a “full body possession,” though. More often, I’ll just experience the thoughts or feelings of my parallel selves (alongside my present-self thoughts or feelings) and have to parse it out. I can be vacuuming the floor, having a normal one, and then suddenly I’ll be intimately aware the Ben!Me is bored or that Ɐwhrayɐ!Me is in danger. I then have to extrapolate as much information as possible from this quick flash (like a flashback, but current, not past… a flashsideways? flashadjacent? flashalong? Let’s go with that). If the “flashalong” was accompanied by an image, which they often are, it’s not too difficult to figure out what my alternate self is doing. If it’s just an emotion and nothing else, I can try to piece it together with the other flashalongs I’ve had recently - if yesterday my parallel self got lost and today I sense despair, it’s not too difficult to put two and two together and know that they haven’t found their way out yet.”

What you’re describing does honestly sound like a hearttype - just a different kind of hearttype than your previous ones. There’s a myriad of different otherhearted experiences, from vague joy at seeing your hearttype, to overwhelming familiarity, to a feeling that you could/should be your hearttype even though you are not it. Check out this post, it might help you: https://aestherians.tumblr.com/post/701992460324339712/

I honestly just go with whatever’s easiest/comes to me naturally. There’s rarely a deeper thought process to it

If I’m really struggling to decide and just want to write, I usually send my list of essay ideas to a friend and have them decide

• Accept that you’re gonna write a lot of bad essays before you get a good one
• Read a lot of essays. Learn what works and what doesn’t
• Be mindful of your essay’s throughline - try to make your conclusion match your introduction and try to make every paragraph lead into the next
• Don’t post your essay immediately after you’ve finished it. Spend a day or two rereading and editing it
• Don’t fear the blank page. Fight it. Force words onto it, even if they sound bad. You can edit a bad text, you can’t edit a blank page.

Sure, I don’t see why not? If you can picture yourself living in it, it can be a hearthome. If you can’t live in it, it can more generally be described as a hearttype

Let me tell you a secret: Fictional animals in media were also just made up by a guy one day. I know the names of the designers who made a good 90% of the aliens I turn into. I know the names of the guys who invented gnolls. Not my kintype, but hell, I know the specific cultures that invented unicorns. Doesn’t matter if it was a team of proficient comic book artists, some random roleplayers doing it in their spare time, or ancient travelers trying to make sense of all the weird new animals they were seeing. Doesn’t matter how the animals were made up, or how long ago, it has no impact on whether you can see yourself as one of them. The only difference between a galvanic mechamorph and a sergal is how many people initially worked on it. The only difference between a gnoll and a sergal is the intent of their creators. The only difference between a unicorn and a sergal is time. They have more in common than not.

Sounds like a type of memory/noema. Could also be that you just have a very vivid imagination, but then again, that doesn’t rule out it being a noema.

In my own personal experience, memories and noemata for hearttypes can vary wildly. I don’t have any ‘somatic’ noemata connected to my Tarzan hearttype. I don’t know what it’s like to swing on vines or ride an elephant. But I do have that kind of noemata with my unicorn hearttype. I can say, with a pretty high degree of confidence, what it feels like to have a horn on your forehead.

It’s more common with kintypes, but it’s not unheard of with hearttypes.

My most important piece of advice: Be patient, but be persistent. Keep questioning, but don’t rush to reach a conclusion. There’s nothing wrong with being “just a bird” while you explore your birdhood further.

If you wanna be proactive about your questioning process, you can follow the three R’s:

• Record your day-to-day alterhuman experiences in a journal
• Research related topics, such as animal behavior, community history, other people’s experiences, philosophy, and spirituality, just to name a few.
• Reflect on your experiences and what you’ve found out, for example by meditating or by just allowing your mind to wander while doing other tasks

A paratype is a creature/concept/object/character that you have some sort of identification with, but whose identification only exists because of a pre-established identity. As a bison, it’s just natural that I identify with other bovines, so other bovines are a paratype to my bison theriotype. I borrowed the word from biology, where a paratype is a specimen that’s defined in relation to a holotype.

All of them at once I suppose¯\_(ツ)_/¯

True answer: Whichever one feels right. Think less about categorizing your identity and more about which communities make you feel at home and which types of people you want to surround yourself with

Short answer: Yes, that can happen

Long answer:

There are two ways to go about explaining your kintype’s origins - let’s call them the ‘experiential’ and 'explanatory’ approaches.

The experiential approach is when you ask “what?” What exactly am I feeling?
The explanatory approach is when you constantly ask “why? why? why?” Why do I feel this way? Why am I like this?

Often the two approaches reach the same conclusion. Many people answer both of them with “past life” or “psychological phenomenon.” Other times, the answers seem to contradict each other.

The experiential approach only concerns what you’re experiencing right now. The experiential approach says “I experience shifts, I experience memories, I experience hiraeth, and that’s why I am my kintype.” The origins of those experiences are completely and utterly irrelevant. You simply experience them, and together they make you otherkind.

The explanatory approach concerns the origins of those experiences. It says “I experience memories, they must be from a past life” or “Past lives don’t make sense to me, it must be psychological” or “This is outside the scope of regular psychology or spirituality, something parapsychological must be causing this,” etc. It’s an attempt at explaining the experiences that were already there.

Looking at it this way, experiencing a past life and explaining it with psychology is in no way contradictory.

I’m not sure. A paratype is an offshoot of another identity of yours. My bull paratype is an offshoot of my bison theriotype and my okapi paratype is an offshoot of my unicorn hearttype and so on. If you feel like that describes your relationship with foxes, then yeah, use the term. But the way you describe it, in this case I think just sticking with “fursona” might be descriptive enough? You might also want to consider foxheartedness, since your relationship with foxes is strong enough that you use them as a representation of yourself