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.

Since I shared my diagnosis with her my mother has been curious to try and pin down what caused this, and what she can do to help fix me. At this point I’m not sure if I could be fixed. I don’t mean that to be dramatic or demeaning in some way. I don’t, always, consider myself broken. I have some days where I feel like a broken vase in a string bag, and others were I realize that I’m more of a mosaic. I think anyone who is sick has feelings like that, and it’s usually only on days where other things, like the fibromyalgia are being problematic that I tend to feel useless and irretrievably broken.

Other times I seek to find the humor in this, otherwise I think I really would just give up.

I know it was in college when I was with “Zoe” who I not so lovingly tend to refer to as “My Psycho Ex” also that I realized something was up, that through our exploration of past lives my separate parts began to find more cohesion and a means to have a stronger voice. Before that I thought Voice (as Max was known then) was just my conscience. I actually thought for a while when I was a child that had epilepsy because I read that epileptics would lose focus and have those “time jumps” I talked about, at that time they were usually just a few minutes or a matter of hours. I put them down to what teachers and family told me that it was either my imagination, or just day dreaming.

I saw “Pinocchio” and started to look on Voice like Jimminy Cricket. However Voice tended to suggest things that would get me into trouble half the time, other times I found myself palling around with people I didn’t know very well, or like all that much. However as much as Ami thinks she’s weak, she had a lot of control over Max when I was growing up, keeping him in check and from doing things that were too bad. The extent of his pranks proved to be buying a gerbil and keeping him in the closet over night until Ami woke up and got rid of it, or buying cigarettes and things like that. I remember going out one night with a friend, and then coming back too in bed, with hazy recollections of being around the prom and hanging out with a few people, and then realizing there was a foul taste in my mouth and running into the bathroom and brushing my teeth and tongue about six times.

I had two radically different groups of friends, and really I’m lucky that I didn’t get into more trouble, which I put down to Ami, and perhaps Debbi too; but I don’t know for sure. I know Kiddy got me out of at least one situation where someone was trying to press an advantage, and me into a hedge for some kind of purpose I don’t even want to think about…

But what’s the cause? I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know if I ever will. I have interest, but other times I don’t know that it’s really worth pressing things to find out. I know of a few traumatic events which have happened to me, but they were in mid to late child hood, which apparently is too late in life for “normal” (whatever that means) DID…well, boo, I’ve never claimed to be normal! Why should I start with my state of mind?

Was it just the experimentation with past lives which allowed the slight splits to really form their own identities? or did I just not realize the extent of everything going on? Was it something that happened so very very early in my development that I never realized anything was wrong until the balance was upset with Zoe trying to force past lives on me I didn’t have and getting me to channel spirits that rally screwed with things?

I could drive myself crazy pushing for answers to all these questions.

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.

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.