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lykomancer(This isn't friends-locked. What would be the point? I doubt anyone who isn't my friend will read this, and if people think I'm looney, that's OK with me. My therapist already has that suspicion, and she's more qualified than most of you people.)
I define myself as a therianthrope.
I'm not going to bother pointing out all the various places you can get a decent, coherent, understandable definition of this.
This is going to be my definition, and it's going to be strange, incoherent, wandering, full of loop-holes, and about as easy to understand as the Trinity and nature of Jesus. If you want definition A, well... go someplace else, 'cause this is all about definition B.
If you are going to point out to me-- when you are finished reading-- how my rambling makes no sense and isn't well-thought out, you can also go away. I already know that. I already said that.
____
Run, wolf warrior, to ends eternal
Through the wreckage of the death of the day
Scent of silence under starlight spinning
A captured beast within a human skin
There is this short, Rubanesque, blue eyed, near-sighted and glasses-wearing, naturally mahogany-haired human girl, right? People interact with her and she's obnoxious as hell but that's OK 'cause people are masochistic and keep coming back for more of her brand of obnoxiousness. In fact, most of 'em seem to really like it. Righty-O. Whatever makes 'em happy.
This human girl was named "Jessica" by her still-in-high-school-at-the-time young mother, and usually goes by "Jess" because she hates the cuteness and femininity inherent in any other shortening of her given name.
When she was a little girl, Jess liked playing outside. She was often by herself and liked it that way, as other people were threatening, loud, pushy, all-around bastards that gave her pounding migraines and emotional breakdowns. She was scrawny and lived the majority of her life in her head, though she wouldn't have understood it that way if asked then about it. Jess would rise with the sun and sit on the rough plastic outdoor carpeted backdoor steps of the duplex where she lived with her mother and maternal grandparents, and savor the warmth of the sunlight on her left and the lingering chill of night on her right. She would chase the semi-tame rabbits through the neighbor's yards; she ate grass and the fruits of her landlord's gardens. When her family visited her maternal great-grandmother, she would get lost for hours by herself in the swampy woods surrounding the green house her great-grandfather had built long before she was born. Most of the time, she liked to play that she was an animal, a hero, and she imagined herself as such and acted the part.
Life was nice and simple. Some things felt good and thus were good, and some things felt bad and thus were bad.
Are you searching for long lost landscapes
Lit by flowers and crystal cascades?
Where the lamb lies down with the lion
Where the wolf is one with the wild
And then Jess grew up. Well, that shit happens, right? No one stays innocent forever.
Her grandmother moved away from home, and puberty hit with all the gentleness of a sack of bricks dropped from the Empire State building, and then the depression kicked in, which no one knew was depression 'cause it wasn't so "popular" back then. Maybe I should say "fashionable" instead? *shrugs* In either case...
Jess started subconsciously breaking off her emotional attachments to her family. After all, if the person who you love most in the world can leave you and move far away-- three hours drive is forever away to a ten-year-old-- then it's just better if you can prepare yourself and not care so much. There's only so much you can cry over something; only so many times your heart can break.
(Dol l'maara quidrana quineeh linaana lalepa hh'tai; saavamax linaaha niidata ta dol h'aart ri linaaha fylaha niidaata aasiah.)
Jess had been fairly well accepted at her higher-class elementary school up until fourth grade. Even though she was from the poor part of the district, she was smart and capable and generally minded her own business.
Heh, it's funny how things change.
The strange behavior brought on by her depression lost her a lot of friends and allies, and caused a great deal of mistrust, disgust, and unrest among her classmates. She switched schools a few times between fourth and sixth grade, living first with her mother and grandfather in Hazleton, and then with her grandmother in Blossburg, back to Hazleton where she was a "latch-key kid" (in the terminology of the day), and finally back to Bloss.
Socially, Blossburg wasn't much better. It was, in fact, worse. The kids at that school were petty little backstabbing immature monsters who would be sweet as pie to you in the morning and be spreading malicious rumors about you by the final bell. The only trait that was valued was being a bigger bitch than everyone else. Being too moral and cowardly to be a bitch, Jess opted to just shut up, take her punches, and scrape by without attracting too much attention.
The wonderful thing about living where she did outside of Bloss was the fact that her grandmother's new house had a large yard and a half-mile long field and strip of woods behind it. Jess spent much time outside, running through the field, climbing apple trees, eating wild berries, and avoiding the company of other people 'cause other people clearly sucked... Ah, but the trees were shadowy and green, whispering secrets; the field grasses golden and waving the the cool winds, caressing any who walked through them; the sky was the same color as her eyes; and the silver pitted moon hung so close she often reached up to touch it.
Jess was afraid of people, but she danced thunder up in that field when no one was looking. She ran with the lightning. She cried and howled and screamed. She stalked the deer and was not afraid to go among them. She thought she was an animal, and imagined herself so, and acted the part, and it was no more a contrived act than it ever had been in the past.
Run, wolf warrior, through kingdoms' chaos
Senseless cities and ghost towns towering
Howl, O hunter, though few know you're crying
Face upturned into that midnight moon
Are you hunting for mystic mountains
Where the air is like liquid laughter?
Where the beasts inherit the earth?
Where the last again will be first?
Things were never really right and never really wrong.
Jess never looked forward to being a woman. She never played with dolls of any sort; she didn't play with make-up except to explore its possibilities as war-paint. She didn't like skirts or dresses or high heels or bras. She never liked playing dress up unless it meant she could dress up as a warrior or an animal. She never played house. She didn't dream of her wedding day or her first crush or kiss or date. She never thought of having children. She fell in love easily, that much is true, but it was pure emotion with no sense or reason or thought behind it.
After she found out about sex, she learned the adult labels for the physical pleasure she'd felt for years, a pleasure she'd long since known and which she associated with the intense physical pleasure one must feel when one shifted shape from human to animal... the rapture of your body comprehending something as if for the first time and embracing the power and beauty of the animalistic soul. Sexual pleasure was only the smallest taste of the joy of complete realization. The most shocking thing she learned about sex was that it was supposed to be with another person. It had never occurred to her that it could be a multi-player activity.
Jess was, like most preteen to teenaged girls, very unhappy about her body. Too fat, too broad-shouldered, too hairy, too frizzy-headed, too near-sighted for anything but Coke-bottle lenses and too poor for contacts; some things were the source of her unhappiness not because they were wrong, per say, but because society said they were wrong
And then, some things were just...wrong. Her body didn't move right, and its response time was too slow. Things didn't smell strongly enough, and this lack of scent information was more disturbing than the lack of visual clues when she removed her glasses. The human body doesn't have large, movable ears or a tail with which to display mood, and baring your teeth, she learned, might feel like the right thing to do but usually it only made people laugh instead of making them back off.
Inherent, instinctual behavior rose up from her subconscious, and was filtered through this strange human body, losing its power and dignity, making her just a oddball, an outsider.
Jess earned the reputation of "being" a wolf sometime in seventh grade. She did not call herself such-- other people did, seeing her behavior-- but she accepted this with joy. Ah...yes. She was not strange; she was simply something else, something not-them. Something not quite human. There was a word for what she was, and was it any wonder she expected to feel fangs in her smile?
Run, wolf warrior, to hide your hunger
The rain will wash away the pains of the day
In your eyes there are cold fires burning
Tongues of flame that can never be tamed
Jess was a liberal thinker, and this got her into a lot of trouble. She's only gotten more liberal with age, and sometimes it still gets her in trouble. Gosh, you think she'd learn...? (Ok, no, not really. No one ever expects the stubborn bitch to learn. XD )
Besides having this really weird-ass idea that she somehow wasn't fully human when she was 13 or so, she also had this pretty good idea that she was bisexual when she was 14 or so. And there was no identity-crisis or freak-out, no moments of "OMG, I might like girls and that's sick and wrong!"; Jess was chillin' with her bi-ness. Jess, in fact, actually believed that everyone felt just as she did and were bisexual to one degree or another for a very long time. (Finding out that wasn't true was Big Surprise #2 about sex.)
Jess has recently upgraded her "bisexual" status to "pansexual". She hates being so fucking trendy, but the term fits better with her understanding of gender, sexuality, and sex, since bisexual implies a dualistic sex/gender scheme and she doesn't believe that things as fluid and blurry as sex and gender can be placed on a polarized scale. Jess doesn't just like boys and girls, Jess also likes unidentifiable androgynous people, cross-dressers, transvestites, transgendered or transsexual folk, intersexed people... y'know, the works. 'S all good.
Part of it is the fact that Jess has never felt very female or feminine in her own life. Sometime around tenth grade she had this sudden realization that she felt a bit like a man in a woman's body (and, no, she was not, at this point, familiar at all with the concept of "transgendered"-- she thought this was an original thought/idea/concept/sensation at the time she wrote this down). Or at least she identified more strongly with the masculine than with the feminine.
She was OK calling herself agendered for a while, feeling neither fully female nor fully male. She hated being identified as female... She hated her flesh for its species, its sex, its age. What a worthless piece of crap. It didn't send any of the right signals. Still doesn't, for that matter
Are you running from Man's delusion
Majestic madness and your exclusion
To where the lamb lies down with the lion?
One might think that it was a grand day when Jess found the online therianthrope communities when she was in college. It was a lot more like a grand five minutes, and then Jess decided that most of those found online who identify themselves as therian were full of shit.
She had some firm ideas about the subject. She didn't trust the proliferation of so-called "poly-weres"-- desperate attention-seeking wannabes who wanted to "be" everything like being a therian was like picking icecream flavors, or else those who couldn't tell the difference between themselves and their spirit-guides. She hated the fact that many "knew" what their "wereform" looked like, and oh, surprise-surprise...it was always something special or unique and/or not found in nature. There were no grizzled grey weres-- y'know, wolf-colored?; they were all "frost-white with violet eyes" or "ebony with three golden socks and a white patch around one eye" or some-such purple-prose crap. She loathed the bland, boring, unoriginal "werenames"... The most original thing about some of them was the way they were spelled. And she was appalled to find that almost all the "weres" were, of course, wolves.
Just like her.
Lemmee explain. Jess is, was, and probably always will be, anti-social in the most literal sense of the word. She is "against society" and its norms. She will sometimes go actively out of her way to avoid what is popular.
Therefore, she hated "being" a "popular" species.
Lemmee tell ya something else.
She's still not happy about it.
Are you running down ancient pathways
Through this dark and deserted land
To where man is once more a child?
The last six years of her life has led to some interesting developments, understandings, and amalgamations. Paying closer attention to her feelings, instincts, emotions, she has fine-tuned her therian definition of herself. She's matured (like a fine wine: good bouquet, strong flavor-- fruity and a little nutty, with a bitey aftertaste, dry but quite palatable). She's not afraid of people anymore; she's no coward. She still bares her teeth and tries to wag a non-existent tail. Instead of chasing rabbits or deer, now she's chasing God. It's not like its simple to know who and what you are, "for now we see as through a glass darkly..."
But I still am, as I always was: not male, not female, not human, not animal, not wild, not tame-- an angry, happy-go-lucky, opinionated, depressed, creative, spiritual, intelligent, open-minded male-female wolf-dog.
And I'm OK with this.
I will be a hero, someday, watch 'n' see.
Are you running to freedom's fortress
By the side of wide open seas
Where the wolf is one with the wild?
Run, run, run...
I define myself as a therianthrope.
I'm not going to bother pointing out all the various places you can get a decent, coherent, understandable definition of this.
This is going to be my definition, and it's going to be strange, incoherent, wandering, full of loop-holes, and about as easy to understand as the Trinity and nature of Jesus. If you want definition A, well... go someplace else, 'cause this is all about definition B.
If you are going to point out to me-- when you are finished reading-- how my rambling makes no sense and isn't well-thought out, you can also go away. I already know that. I already said that.
____
Run, wolf warrior, to ends eternal
Through the wreckage of the death of the day
Scent of silence under starlight spinning
A captured beast within a human skin
There is this short, Rubanesque, blue eyed, near-sighted and glasses-wearing, naturally mahogany-haired human girl, right? People interact with her and she's obnoxious as hell but that's OK 'cause people are masochistic and keep coming back for more of her brand of obnoxiousness. In fact, most of 'em seem to really like it. Righty-O. Whatever makes 'em happy.
This human girl was named "Jessica" by her still-in-high-school-at-the-time young mother, and usually goes by "Jess" because she hates the cuteness and femininity inherent in any other shortening of her given name.
When she was a little girl, Jess liked playing outside. She was often by herself and liked it that way, as other people were threatening, loud, pushy, all-around bastards that gave her pounding migraines and emotional breakdowns. She was scrawny and lived the majority of her life in her head, though she wouldn't have understood it that way if asked then about it. Jess would rise with the sun and sit on the rough plastic outdoor carpeted backdoor steps of the duplex where she lived with her mother and maternal grandparents, and savor the warmth of the sunlight on her left and the lingering chill of night on her right. She would chase the semi-tame rabbits through the neighbor's yards; she ate grass and the fruits of her landlord's gardens. When her family visited her maternal great-grandmother, she would get lost for hours by herself in the swampy woods surrounding the green house her great-grandfather had built long before she was born. Most of the time, she liked to play that she was an animal, a hero, and she imagined herself as such and acted the part.
Life was nice and simple. Some things felt good and thus were good, and some things felt bad and thus were bad.
Are you searching for long lost landscapes
Lit by flowers and crystal cascades?
Where the lamb lies down with the lion
Where the wolf is one with the wild
And then Jess grew up. Well, that shit happens, right? No one stays innocent forever.
Her grandmother moved away from home, and puberty hit with all the gentleness of a sack of bricks dropped from the Empire State building, and then the depression kicked in, which no one knew was depression 'cause it wasn't so "popular" back then. Maybe I should say "fashionable" instead? *shrugs* In either case...
Jess started subconsciously breaking off her emotional attachments to her family. After all, if the person who you love most in the world can leave you and move far away-- three hours drive is forever away to a ten-year-old-- then it's just better if you can prepare yourself and not care so much. There's only so much you can cry over something; only so many times your heart can break.
(Dol l'maara quidrana quineeh linaana lalepa hh'tai; saavamax linaaha niidata ta dol h'aart ri linaaha fylaha niidaata aasiah.)
Jess had been fairly well accepted at her higher-class elementary school up until fourth grade. Even though she was from the poor part of the district, she was smart and capable and generally minded her own business.
Heh, it's funny how things change.
The strange behavior brought on by her depression lost her a lot of friends and allies, and caused a great deal of mistrust, disgust, and unrest among her classmates. She switched schools a few times between fourth and sixth grade, living first with her mother and grandfather in Hazleton, and then with her grandmother in Blossburg, back to Hazleton where she was a "latch-key kid" (in the terminology of the day), and finally back to Bloss.
Socially, Blossburg wasn't much better. It was, in fact, worse. The kids at that school were petty little backstabbing immature monsters who would be sweet as pie to you in the morning and be spreading malicious rumors about you by the final bell. The only trait that was valued was being a bigger bitch than everyone else. Being too moral and cowardly to be a bitch, Jess opted to just shut up, take her punches, and scrape by without attracting too much attention.
The wonderful thing about living where she did outside of Bloss was the fact that her grandmother's new house had a large yard and a half-mile long field and strip of woods behind it. Jess spent much time outside, running through the field, climbing apple trees, eating wild berries, and avoiding the company of other people 'cause other people clearly sucked... Ah, but the trees were shadowy and green, whispering secrets; the field grasses golden and waving the the cool winds, caressing any who walked through them; the sky was the same color as her eyes; and the silver pitted moon hung so close she often reached up to touch it.
Jess was afraid of people, but she danced thunder up in that field when no one was looking. She ran with the lightning. She cried and howled and screamed. She stalked the deer and was not afraid to go among them. She thought she was an animal, and imagined herself so, and acted the part, and it was no more a contrived act than it ever had been in the past.
Run, wolf warrior, through kingdoms' chaos
Senseless cities and ghost towns towering
Howl, O hunter, though few know you're crying
Face upturned into that midnight moon
Are you hunting for mystic mountains
Where the air is like liquid laughter?
Where the beasts inherit the earth?
Where the last again will be first?
Things were never really right and never really wrong.
Jess never looked forward to being a woman. She never played with dolls of any sort; she didn't play with make-up except to explore its possibilities as war-paint. She didn't like skirts or dresses or high heels or bras. She never liked playing dress up unless it meant she could dress up as a warrior or an animal. She never played house. She didn't dream of her wedding day or her first crush or kiss or date. She never thought of having children. She fell in love easily, that much is true, but it was pure emotion with no sense or reason or thought behind it.
After she found out about sex, she learned the adult labels for the physical pleasure she'd felt for years, a pleasure she'd long since known and which she associated with the intense physical pleasure one must feel when one shifted shape from human to animal... the rapture of your body comprehending something as if for the first time and embracing the power and beauty of the animalistic soul. Sexual pleasure was only the smallest taste of the joy of complete realization. The most shocking thing she learned about sex was that it was supposed to be with another person. It had never occurred to her that it could be a multi-player activity.
Jess was, like most preteen to teenaged girls, very unhappy about her body. Too fat, too broad-shouldered, too hairy, too frizzy-headed, too near-sighted for anything but Coke-bottle lenses and too poor for contacts; some things were the source of her unhappiness not because they were wrong, per say, but because society said they were wrong
And then, some things were just...wrong. Her body didn't move right, and its response time was too slow. Things didn't smell strongly enough, and this lack of scent information was more disturbing than the lack of visual clues when she removed her glasses. The human body doesn't have large, movable ears or a tail with which to display mood, and baring your teeth, she learned, might feel like the right thing to do but usually it only made people laugh instead of making them back off.
Inherent, instinctual behavior rose up from her subconscious, and was filtered through this strange human body, losing its power and dignity, making her just a oddball, an outsider.
Jess earned the reputation of "being" a wolf sometime in seventh grade. She did not call herself such-- other people did, seeing her behavior-- but she accepted this with joy. Ah...yes. She was not strange; she was simply something else, something not-them. Something not quite human. There was a word for what she was, and was it any wonder she expected to feel fangs in her smile?
Run, wolf warrior, to hide your hunger
The rain will wash away the pains of the day
In your eyes there are cold fires burning
Tongues of flame that can never be tamed
Jess was a liberal thinker, and this got her into a lot of trouble. She's only gotten more liberal with age, and sometimes it still gets her in trouble. Gosh, you think she'd learn...? (Ok, no, not really. No one ever expects the stubborn bitch to learn. XD )
Besides having this really weird-ass idea that she somehow wasn't fully human when she was 13 or so, she also had this pretty good idea that she was bisexual when she was 14 or so. And there was no identity-crisis or freak-out, no moments of "OMG, I might like girls and that's sick and wrong!"; Jess was chillin' with her bi-ness. Jess, in fact, actually believed that everyone felt just as she did and were bisexual to one degree or another for a very long time. (Finding out that wasn't true was Big Surprise #2 about sex.)
Jess has recently upgraded her "bisexual" status to "pansexual". She hates being so fucking trendy, but the term fits better with her understanding of gender, sexuality, and sex, since bisexual implies a dualistic sex/gender scheme and she doesn't believe that things as fluid and blurry as sex and gender can be placed on a polarized scale. Jess doesn't just like boys and girls, Jess also likes unidentifiable androgynous people, cross-dressers, transvestites, transgendered or transsexual folk, intersexed people... y'know, the works. 'S all good.
Part of it is the fact that Jess has never felt very female or feminine in her own life. Sometime around tenth grade she had this sudden realization that she felt a bit like a man in a woman's body (and, no, she was not, at this point, familiar at all with the concept of "transgendered"-- she thought this was an original thought/idea/concept/sensation at the time she wrote this down). Or at least she identified more strongly with the masculine than with the feminine.
She was OK calling herself agendered for a while, feeling neither fully female nor fully male. She hated being identified as female... She hated her flesh for its species, its sex, its age. What a worthless piece of crap. It didn't send any of the right signals. Still doesn't, for that matter
Are you running from Man's delusion
Majestic madness and your exclusion
To where the lamb lies down with the lion?
One might think that it was a grand day when Jess found the online therianthrope communities when she was in college. It was a lot more like a grand five minutes, and then Jess decided that most of those found online who identify themselves as therian were full of shit.
She had some firm ideas about the subject. She didn't trust the proliferation of so-called "poly-weres"-- desperate attention-seeking wannabes who wanted to "be" everything like being a therian was like picking icecream flavors, or else those who couldn't tell the difference between themselves and their spirit-guides. She hated the fact that many "knew" what their "wereform" looked like, and oh, surprise-surprise...it was always something special or unique and/or not found in nature. There were no grizzled grey weres-- y'know, wolf-colored?; they were all "frost-white with violet eyes" or "ebony with three golden socks and a white patch around one eye" or some-such purple-prose crap. She loathed the bland, boring, unoriginal "werenames"... The most original thing about some of them was the way they were spelled. And she was appalled to find that almost all the "weres" were, of course, wolves.
Just like her.
Lemmee explain. Jess is, was, and probably always will be, anti-social in the most literal sense of the word. She is "against society" and its norms. She will sometimes go actively out of her way to avoid what is popular.
Therefore, she hated "being" a "popular" species.
Lemmee tell ya something else.
She's still not happy about it.
Are you running down ancient pathways
Through this dark and deserted land
To where man is once more a child?
The last six years of her life has led to some interesting developments, understandings, and amalgamations. Paying closer attention to her feelings, instincts, emotions, she has fine-tuned her therian definition of herself. She's matured (like a fine wine: good bouquet, strong flavor-- fruity and a little nutty, with a bitey aftertaste, dry but quite palatable). She's not afraid of people anymore; she's no coward. She still bares her teeth and tries to wag a non-existent tail. Instead of chasing rabbits or deer, now she's chasing God. It's not like its simple to know who and what you are, "for now we see as through a glass darkly..."
But I still am, as I always was: not male, not female, not human, not animal, not wild, not tame-- an angry, happy-go-lucky, opinionated, depressed, creative, spiritual, intelligent, open-minded male-female wolf-dog.
And I'm OK with this.
I will be a hero, someday, watch 'n' see.
Are you running to freedom's fortress
By the side of wide open seas
Where the wolf is one with the wild?
Run, run, run...
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 02:00 pm (UTC)Thank you for the compliments. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2005-03-17 12:45 pm (UTC)If you're interested, I'll drop a note to the mod and she'll probably let you in, even just for lurking. Some really good stuff comes up there sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-17 03:56 pm (UTC)Thankies.