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.

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.