I realized I haven’t talked much about the Otherkin aspect of things lately, and thought I would reflect on that.

I’ve always felt I was weird, and I know now that some of the weirdness growing up was from being Multiple, but while I was trying to sort out what exactly was going on for me it lead me to several different places, and most of them were non-Christian.

I’m fortunate really that I wasn’t raised in a cultish environment, most of my abuse came out more subtly with my grandmother, or more violently with students at my school. My church was actually a very accepting place, and while you might think that would lead me to be more Christian and remain so, it actually meant that I could explore comfortably and find the path that was best for me without being discouraged by the people at our church.

They actually set up a Third Sunday group where those of whose who were teenagers and starting to find our voice could talk with some of the church leaders and each other and explore the Bible and the doubts that we might be having, in the hopes that we would feel welcome within the community that mostly catered to elderly people who, for the most part, would shun us rather than help.

Anyway, this meant that when I was coming to discover that there were things like reincarnation I had a place where I could talk about that without being shunned. One of the pastors and a few of the leaders actually pointed out to me that Christ refers to John the Baptist as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah so if I wanted to explore the theory of reincarnation I could and they would be interested to hear my findings also.

However, the more I read about more earth-based religions the more they appealed to me, and when we emigrated I found more and more basis in the pagan religions than the strange and unusual and more dogmatic ways American churches run.

My explorations were not solely on a reincarnation nature. I’ve been interested in a variety of supernatural and metaphysical things. I would conduct experiments growing up to find ways of proving if certain things existed. I would look for proof of fairies, ghosts, telekinesis, and at one point even wrote a paper on different methodologies of testing these abilities. I made myself Zener Cards and tested them with friends, and many different things.

I found out about Past Life regression and began looking into that, and discovered, before I went to college, I did indeed have at least one past life as a shaman in Peru around the time the Spanish first discovered the Incan civilization. So, I went to college armed with this discovery and more than a little shaky in my knowledge of myself, because rather than help me with the voices, the discovery of Myeda had sent everything in my head into a bit of an uproar. My room mate promptly decided that I was bipolar, and I met several other people within the first few months of my college who seemed to have the same sort of beliefs that I did, except they found solace in characters from anime and famous people and not just “regular past lives”. It was intriguing to me but in many ways it fit with things that were going on. They talked about these people living with them in their head, and that’s the way the voices had always been for me. They would live in my head and some times they would take over for me.

The techniques these people used helped me, somewhat, get a handle on the voice situation. However, one of these people I met became a very controlling influence in my life, which for three years, was definitely not a good situation to be in. Still, I have to credit “Zoe” with helping me in a round-about and very destructive way, because recovering from all that mess really gave each of my alters a solid foundation in the past and future lives that I’d uncovered thanks to the work and manipulations of Zoe.

It was during that recovery that I discovered otherkin. A friend that I’d met online while trying to get out from under Zoe happened across Otherkin.net and the questionnaire they had, she had filled it out and come out as potentially otherkin and I did the same and also got that result. It was because of the dreams and memories of being non-human; even when I was still in England I’d felt like an alien masquerading, and I had stories full of memories from Yana and she was not human. Since then I’d discovered wolfish lives, and werewolf lives, as well as several other human lives, and many of my alters have cleaved to those lives as the basis of their personalities. I’m not sure if that’s the way it works with every multiple, and it probably isn’t, but I’m grateful for the otherkin aspect of things because working on that has helped me to maintain balance, and who knows what would have become of me without that balance.

This is something I found saved on the hard drive while I was trying to find our resume. One of us wrote it at some point and I find it very interesting and useful:

The things I find it prudent to remind myself of is that it’s not always necessary or important to actually place yourself in an era because you might not need to learn anything from it, it is actually possible to have a happy and well adjusted life who has no issues. I like to think of them as ‘true vacation lives’ or ‘yay, I win!’, and other times it’s also important to note that while you might remember something one way, another person might not, and that does not make either of you incorrect. Everyone remembers things differently from day to day, why? because that’s a part of life, each of us has a different take on things, perhaps because we have different information or because we don’t want to remember exactly what went on, or we weren’t properly paying attention. These things happen. Ask any police officer who has interviewed several different witnesses about a crime scene (which I have, because I know one) and wow, the different stories you’ll get about something that happened…sometimes witnesses won’t even agree on the race or gender of an assailant, that’s got to be fun; and, that’s something which is going on in the HERE AND NOW, imagine you’re talking another life time where things are hazy recollections across time and space to begin with, and you’re expecting to see things exactly the same? I’ve got news for you. You’re NOT going to. Stop trying.

In many ways it’s better, I believe, if memories do not agree, it feels to me that then there is a more accurate interpretation of the era and life going on, rather than something someone is reading off parrot-fed. Especially when you’re dealing with otherkin, because with otherkin lives it’s a lot harder to draw upon a memory and back it up by going to a historical archive somewhere. If you reincarnate to Vietnam as a soldier, there’s a good chance you can give a name, a rank, a serial number and have it found, and then look at what you feel happened to you and look at what the historical archives say happened to you and validate your memories. That is a lot harder with otherkin, because there is no archival information beyond legend, or in some cases perhaps a book or series that you might feel the author channeled from the same life time you’re tuning into, but chances are in those cases, what you remember and what the author wrote so that he/she could gain commercial acclaim and financial success NOT similar in the slightest.

Anyway, moving on towards soul mates, if you’re still with me by this point, go you, or I’m sorry, whichever you prefer.

Soul mates are a different kettle of fish, because that involves a slightly different situation. When I speak of soul mates here, I don’t speak of a group of people varying roles all and around. I speak of the more commonly conceived notion of two people who are destined to pair off romantically because they have done it over and over and over and over ad naueseum.

Why ‘ad nauseum’? This goes into the realm of my personal opinion, so it might antagonize a few people, but bear with me, okay? I can see the benefit to soul mates, but just barely, and granted this is highly subjective because I know it’s colored by own very personal and very negative experience with squishing yourself into the ’soul mate’ category to your own detriment, why? Because I did.

If you believe you’ve met your soul mate and it’s working for you. Good for you. So long as you’re not limiting and squashing yourself because of it.

To me, reincarnating is about having a variety of experiences, and I do not believe you can appropriately have a variety of experiences and learn to your full potential if you constantly do the same thing. On a much smaller scale, it would be like wanting to learn about all the foods in the world but only going to “Burger King” to eat, and maybe once in a while branching out and going to “MacDonalds”. If you want to learn about all the foods in the world, you’re going to have to travel, because even if you go to all the different restaurants in the United States, you’re still only getting a very narrow perspective. That’s the way I see the over publicized ideal of soul mates.

Now, do I have a soul mate? I do believe I have incarnated with my spouse before. I do believe I have known several friends before, but have I always hooked up with the same soul? No. I’ve had series of time, stretches of life times even, where I have hooked up with the same soul, but there are other life times where that soul might be my sibling, my co-worker, my mother, my son. Variance of experience.

I was with someone for quite some time, and we believed ourselves to be soul mates. I think sometimes that the soul mate thing, for many, is a fanciful phase we go through while we’re still young and romantic and first uncovering the possibility of reincarnation. This is not to say that if someone tells me they’ve met their soul mate I’m going to tell them that they’re wrong. If they believe that, it’s great, I’m more inclined to think they may have met the soul mate of theirs they elected for this life time as their partner, and in another life time they might hook up with a different person from their ka-tet, depending on what they need to learn.

My point, as rambling as it is, is that while we may have life times where we get to sit around and just relax after assessing our various experiences and sort of process everything we’ve learned and been through is that while it is nice to mesh with people and have a connection that shouldn’t be the be all and end all of your reason for reincarnating. Learn to live on your own terms first, learn to be yourself, expand as much as you can, experience as much as you can. Try to be complete on your own rather than focusing all your attention on either fixing or completing someone else, and as you learn and find connections don’t discount those connections or try to force your memories on others, revel in the differences, because those are what make us special. I’m not saying that we’re all special and unique snowflakes, but we are all different, and it’s those differences which make us.

I think I was right. I won’t say I know I was right because I can’t endeavor to say with certainty what’s going on in other people’s brains, but I seriously feel disconnected from a lot of people and there’s a block there preventing me from reaching out all the time. It’s draining. I get sick of it.

Socialization is something that is hard to get in the situations that I’m in, with the lack of money, the illness which makes me so fucking tired at times that I can barely stay awake to make food for the munchkin, add to that the munchkin that a lot of people we know really can’t relate to, and I don’t want to pawn him off on my Mum just so I can go driving.

I’m grateful that I have a few friends who still talk to me and will come and visit or that my husband can make arrangements so I can go and see some people…but still it seems like things are way different now, and talking with K whose been visiting kinda affirms to me that there has been some uncertainty with how to approach me, and some fear on people’s parts that I’m going to up and decide it was all wrong.

True I haven’t been getting much input lately, but I know things have been so overwhelming for me on many quarters that it’s been enough just to get through one day to the next, and there have been dreams I just haven’t been able to hold on to them properly.

I’m not discounting any of the experiences I had or have had over the past few years just because I’ve been diagnosed as having multiple personalities, in fact it’s made things a bit more clear for me in a lot of respects. The reason why it was so easy for me to flip and channel change for example, because the alters and the other lives meshed together, it made the alters stronger, it made me stronger, I’m grateful to it and for it, because if it wasn’t for discovering the other lives and the alters I wouldn’t have been able to deal with the fractures so well, I wouldn’t have had the tools to find out and research and work through things on my own, to gain a semblance of co-consciousness or anything else like that. I would have wound up in situations that I see having happened with other DID diagnoses where they’ve been in and out of hospital or in and out of jail because they have no communication with certain alters who just do whatever the fuck they feel like doing.

I don’t even want to think of the trouble that Terri or maybe even Sanzo type personality could have gotten me in to if they weren’t keenly aware that X or Y was in their life time and this wasn’t it.

I feel I have to say it partially for myself too, that we’re still here and we’re still us, that even our therapist doesn’t poo-poo the reincarnation aspect of things. She just admits that she doesn’t know everything and that it could well be the reason for X, Y and Z. In fact dealing with the therapist has pretty much validated things over doubts that I had. She read the entry that Max wrote which talked about suicide attempts and self-harm and said that it seriously read like he had done those things, even though physically in this life I’ve never actually put the knife to flesh only thought about it and then had Ami stop us. She said the writing was very kinesthetic that it was clearly something that he had done, and I said that the only time I knew he had done those things was in the life time that was similar not in this time.

Enough ramble from me right now…I need to make some food now that I’ve woken up a bit better.

I’ve finally stopped hedging and imported the posts from Centuries Old and Still a Work in Progress into this one, and am preparing to shut it down. If you know anyone interested in purchasing miriel.org or eryssa.net for that matter you can contact Ami through ami-chan.net DESIGNS and negotiate things there. We’d just like to see the domains put to good use.

This means that also we’re hoping to be able to start work on other things to do with this blog that we’ve been hoping to write about, such as reviewing the “Field Guide to Otherkin,” although we really have to finish that first, and also working on the “Otherkin Aware” portion of the site that we’ve been knocking around for quite some time.

We still need to redo the layout here.

We’ve been having some issues because it’s become really stifling to write on our other blog…the personal blog which actually posts pictures and does most of our review work and all the rest of it. There’s a good chunk of us who want to be able to explain about the multiplicity there it would be easier to write about things then…but it’s a big step. There’s the possibility that relatives of ours and our significant other read that blog and they haven’t been told about my diagnosis…and that could make things awkward and I don’t want to do that…

It can be a little hard for people to grasp belief systems. It’s tough to have faith especially when you have a hard time trusting yourself. It took a long time for us to accept that it was okay to believe the way we did.

It can be tricky too because not all of us follow the same belief structure, Max is loosely Christian while the majority of the other alters follow Pagan/Shamanistic traditions, with a lot of respect and worship for nature. I think it helps that Max isn’t fundamentalist, he recalls being raised within a church but trusts more in his own heart, but he’s definitely not pagan.

While trying to sort out what was going on with us we researched many different things. The one which primarily sticks is otherkin, given we’ve come to believe that we fractured along the lines of past lives.

It seems that our initial break was probably when we were young, and then another break around eight or nine which brought out Max and Ami, and then through high school and college some mini-fractures and heals and things until we’re at the point we’re at now.

During college we did a lot of research into metaphysical things, primarily researching the possibility of past and future incarnation and animal incarnations. This led to a lot of stupid practices and a good three months that no one remembers…we’re still not sure if that was a personality schism or a possession, perhaps a combination of both. Up until we found out about the possibility of schisms we accepted it as “being possessed”.

The work that we did wasn’t all bad though. It helped us find ways to deal with and cope with what was going on in our head, and enabled us to find a way to actually function as a system. We’ve come to view our head as an apartment building. Each of the doors gives us a gateway to another lifetime that we’ve had. Some of them were just looked at as life times and those doors don’t need to be opened again, but others have stuck around to help us function, to give us pointers and coping mechanisms that we wouldn’t already have.

Yes, existing like this isn’t for everyone, but it’s what works for us. Without doing this we’d probably have had a complete breakdown and be rocking back and forth in a mental health institution. That wouldn’t be good at all. Because we did this we’ve managed to live a pretty darn good life. We’re almost thirty, we have a great husband, a beautiful, beautiful little boy.

There’s been some crappy things, but who doesn’t have crappy things in their life, sad to say.

ZOMG Whu? Two posts in one day! This is unheard of!

Well, it’s been a busy and idea filled day, much thanks to my dear friend SaturnFaerie who helped me iron some of these things out while I helped her iron out some things with her own blog.

I’ve had this idea since oooh, 2004? But life, liberty and the pursuit of marriage and grad school kaiboshed the exploration of it for a while. I’d had the idea of a sort of “online clique” back then but it’s mutated a bit in the four years, and hopefully come out better for it. The idea then was for “Otherkin Aware” to be a place where people could sign up and pimp their businesses that were otherkin-friendly.

That’s a bit…biased. So, I was thinking that instead I would make it a bit of a collective, still going along the same idea, business by otherkin, for otherkin and others. Businesses that are otherkin friendly, businesses that are earth-friendly, as many of us are out to preserve this planet, and businesses that otherkin run that aren’t necessarily solely for otherkin but have that link still.

I’m still ironing some of this out, but in the mean time if you’d like me to review your business let me know! I don’t have much traffic yet, but I’m hoping that will change.

In the mean time this place is probably going to change around a bit again as I iron some more things out within the headspace, we’ve decided that we’re going to make a less “one alter” oriented blog under our “group name” and this will be the face of Otherkin Aware if it comes to fruition, if not the blog will go bye-bye again.

I know, I know, but it’s not going away, away, like I did before, it’s just changing and becoming more “system friendly”. I always go with what’s best for us as a whole, and that’s what’s best. The other blog was started and it was essentially duplicating a good portion of what’s on here anyway, so why be redundant?

It’s interesting to get confirmations on things some times. In one of the werewolf lives I remember bits and pieces from I had written that the name of the town they lived in began with F, when pushing I said Flanders because the Simpsons was on at the time, but I was feeling it was more like Fal-something definitely two syllables not Fife where my grandfather now was born and grew up, plus Fife is the name of an area not a town. It was around an hour away from Edinburgh, and they didn’t live in the town itself but in an area around it, near something pretty significant.

Well, the other night when I was running the game I designed for roleplay for some friends, which is set around that universe/memories so that I have a good route to come up with plot the game ended, and we decided to start a new one based around the Arthurian legend but still within the same universe. Well, I as looking up about the Arthurian legends and one of the strong contenders for the location of Camelot is up in Scotland. It turns out that it is six minutes from the town of Falkirk which is surrounded by a lot of farmland as the area where Jared, my werewolf grew up, and Falkirk is, according to Google Earth, 46 minutes from Edinburgh by road.

I got goosebumps.

When we first broached the idea of therapy among ourselves it was prompted by something our mother said. She has been going to therapy for her own more mundane reasons, and we elected to say that we were fine at this time that perhaps “in the future” we would consider it, which was a brush-off at that point.

We feared therapy, because we have a small child and we’re always afraid of losing him, primarily because in many other lives we have lost children to death, social services, separations, and various other things, like A.J. who gave her child up for adoption because she was only fourteen when she had her.

Anyway, after a few months from the conversation with our mother we started to think that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to go to therapy because we needed an outside perspective, someone who could see things that we’ve been unable to, and who could give us pointers on how to straighten things out. Still we were paranoid.

We decided to ask on several forums and communities about other plural/multiple systems and their experiences with therapy. Then we also found a community for plurals who had physical children (not just child alters) and see if they had any better perspectives on the situation and suggestions for ways to go about it.

One of the major remarks almost entirely across the otherkin/multiple community is that practically all therapists do not know how to deal with multiplicity and force systems to integrate against their will, which my logical sides find hard to believe, but the more nervous paranoid ones freaked out about. The other comments we got were along the lines of “No don’t tell your therapist, they’ll lock you up, they’ll take your child away from you!” and so on. There were a few who advocated telling right away to weed out the bad therapists from the good, so that we could move on to find one who shared our outlook of treatment for multiplicity.

But wow…if we’d listened we’d still be struggling along by ourselves living at half-kilter.

It seems to me that a lot of the most vocal otherkin and multiple systems have as much of a negative stereotype of therapy as they claim that therapists have of them. They complain that not all multiple systems are like those depicted in Sybil, but yet assume that therapists are going to mistreat them rather than help.

I may just have been incredibly lucky with the therapist and psychiatrist that I was referred too, but from what I’m hearing from others who’ve actually gone and seen from people who have dealt with therapists they’re not as stuck in the 50s and 60s as people seem to assume. The ones in my office are fine with the fact that I have esoteric professions and esoteric leanings, they want to work with me and my belief system to help me get my balance restored.

The only medication I’ve been given has been an anti-depressant I asked for, which is a low dose to help with issues that aren’t related to my plurality. They’ve never once mentioned Multiple Personality Disorder, only Multiples and Multiplicity, and haven’t freaked out about anything I’ve mentioned negatively, not even when I talked to them about entity attachment and possession.

In the previous incarnation of this journal I mentioned that I had ordered A Field Guide to Otherkin by Lupa. It’s taken a while but I’ve finally had the opportunity between life, health and other animals to start reading it. In fact I finished the first chapter today while waiting for my therapy appointment. I can say it’s not going to be long before I devour up the rest of it.

I can bet I’m going to have time to kill at several appointments in the near future, and in my pledge to spend time away from the computer screen before going to bed the rest of it is going to get worked on as well.

I love it so far. It’s great to read thoughts that are educated, well thought out and well researched, and not just, “because I say so, that’s why!”

I highly recommend this book as a way to help people who are having issues resolving certain things of Otherkin nature. It’s really helped me to solidify some of my thoughts together.

I was once told by a French songwriter that she believed that I was Otherkin just like she was because of something she could see in my eyes.

I told her I was still trying to explore what I was and wasn’t sure if I truly was otherkin. She said, and I’m paraphrasing now, “Of course, you are. We are other than human only because our souls are something else. It is our souls which make us different.”

Maybe that’s true. It’s hard to quantify things properly when they get to a soul-level.

I’m pretty vehement in maintaining my humanity. I’m not going to slag off the fact that I’m human now. I chose this for whatever purpose I set before the life started. I was born to human parents. I have a human significant other and we have a human child. We are physically human. None of us can morph or shift forms or anything like that.

I’m sure I piss people off with that, but seriously that’s the way it is for me. You may come into my IM screen or my email or even comment here on the blog telling me that you can help me unlock my werewolf side (and seriously why is it always werewolves? I’ve never had someone IM me to unlock my elf side. It’s always “hey, u in2 werewolves?”) because I was a werewolf before and still am now (according to them). For some reason the fact that I was one in a past life is unacceptable to these people. I might be confused about what’s fully going on with me, but I’d think I would know better than you how wolfish I am and am not.

Moving on.

I believe I was creatures other than human in a past life and will be again in future lives, so perhaps that means I should say that I’ve had otherkin lives but I’m not one now?

That’s one of the things I’m trying to straighten out.

For “me” this is particularly confusing at the moment because I’m coming to realize that what I’ve been viewing as channeling and aspecting for some time, and just talking to my other lives is more that I’m fractured along those and working as a plural or multiple system. That further bleeds out the grey areas and makes it problematic to decipher what’s going on.

But, then, that’s what I, or we, are going to therapy for.