blackbirds frying on a wire

I’ve long had a certain affinity for the underwater world, especially certain aquatic habitats - tide pools, kelp forests, the like. But where coyote is very clear and straightforward in my mind, this affinity has been difficult to put my finger on. I know I’ve heard from those with aquatic theriotypes that because life underwater is so alien to the human mind, the feeling of having an aquatic type can be extremely alien and hard to place as well.

Part of questioning this for myself has also included confusion and concurrent questioning with an avian theriotype. The feelings I experience between these two feel very similar, perhaps the same? The sensation of wind or water moving swiftly over my skin or feathers, the sensation of falling or floating or flying, of being unconnected from the ground or the sea floor. I’ve begun to wonder if I don’t have an avian type at all, or if perhaps my avian and aquatic types go hand in hand, maybe in the form of some sort of water bird.

I’ve questioned various aquatic animals over the years, but never been quite sure where I land. Orca feels tempting and homey, a favorite of my childhood, but also much too large. Smaller dolphins aren’t it, larger whales even more outsized. Seals and sea lions are fun, but the sexual dimorphism pulls me up short. I love rays, but when I watch them, again…not quite. Otters are more along the right lines in terms of shape, but seem too silly and active and social. Cormorants, puffins, penguins, loons? None quite what I’m looking for. Molluscs are too alien, not right. Fish, including sharks, are overwhelming to think about, there are so many.

All of it tends to come up short when I try to actually place myself there in the water. I grew up in the desert, for much of my early life the largest natural body of water I knew was a small river that ran dry half the year. I went to the beach and swam some on vacations and at the local YMCA, got lessons, loved being in the water, but wasn’t terribly graceful in it. I stopped swimming for many years when puberty and dysphoria hit, didn’t swim again until after I had top surgery - at least 10 years in-between. I’d never swam in a natural body of water until I swam (ungracefully) in Puget Sound on a hot day in my early 20s. I still don’t really trust myself in deep water, and get easily frightened by the power of the ocean.

But I was always, am always, looking at the water, yearning towards it. Hiking to high alpine lakes and gazing down into them, going to aquaria whenever I have the chance. During the pandemic I lived not far from a public beach where the parking was closed to discourage crowds and would walk there often and enjoy the sound of the surf. Since moving to the coast I’ve loved quiet mornings tidepooling, and birding in verdant marshlands.

Yet I feel like an imposter compared to people who since they were kids could jump in the water and make it look easy. I see surfers and divers and marine biologists and fishermen and wonder, how could I ever claim to have an affinity for water?

My partner and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently, and just sat in front of the Kelp Forest tank for several hours. For once, I felt a little flicker of some sort of recognition when I considered the little leopard sharks zipping by. Their eyes are so much bigger and more expressive in person than they seem in pictures, they feel like they’re watching you back through the glass. The way they undulated through the kelp felt familiar to the sensations I’d been trying to place. I thought of being in among the kelp, moving like liquid, what it would be like to not have to come up to breathe. To be both large and small and important and unimportant in that huge, unknown world.

Camping oddly doesn't make me feel exceptionally coyote-forward. Moreso, it makes me feel in balance between human and coyote. Coyote already knows how to live outside of constructs of time and convenience, human gets on the same page within a day or two outside of cell range and electricity. Human knows what all creature comforts a human still needs (like baby wipes, for when you just feel gross and can't shower...) and coyote gets on the same page within a day or two of experiencing the rugged outdoors through the lens of a human body.

When you spend long enough in the woods (or equivalently away from the modern world in whatever way you choose) time rearranges itself in your mind a bit. The friction of numbers assigned to the spot the sun sits in the sky melts away and time flows smoothly by with changes in light, temperature, hunger, thirst. For coyote brain this is just normal. For human brain, this is a needed reset, a hard restart. You can allow yourself to wake with the sun and retire to the safety of a den/tent in the dark. You can busily fill the day or spend the day listening to birds or watching the tide come in and out.

It changes your perception of the physical world, too. Rain, cold, heat, the dark, things that go bump in the dark - these all take on very different textures of experience when you're fully exposed versus can retreat into climate controlled safety. You understand in a very different way the comfort of a fire, or of other familiar human voices around you. You understand why humans are social apes who have huddled together in the dark since, well, since.

Maybe the outsized focus on it within the alterhuman community comes with alterhuman identities being much harder to externalize and so we end up ruminating on what "makes us" alterhuman as a way of validating internally what the external world cannot. I remember too that back in the grilling days that part of that ritual was often divulging your whole life history in search of the moment of "awakening" and the influences surrounding it. But I never really saw discovering myself as coyote as opening my eyes for the first time so much as putting on a new pair of glasses to reevaluate what was already there.

I suppose longing and dysphoria could be part of it, too. I can definitely understand wanting to retreat into memories of a past life or what have you if that's something that you experience.

I do identify with some mixed psychological, spiritual, and perhaps other factors, but it always feels like an odd chicken and egg situation for me. Does animality feel connected to my autistic and other neurodivergent experiences because it springs from those experiences, or does it feel connected because those are just my reality that all my other experience, including animality and transness and etc, filters through? Am I an animist and a polytheist because I'm an animal, or am I an animal who chose to be an animist and a polytheist because these, to me, honor my experiences more than more human-centric paths?

Part of why I identify my therianthropy so strongly with my autism is that my outward displays of emotion feel so kneecapped by phantom sensations telling me I'm emoting when I'm not. I'm nervous or anxious about something and my ears go back and I can feel fur prickling on the back of my neck, except they don't and it doesn't. I'm backed into a metaphorical corner by a situation at work and I want to bare my teeth and claim back some of my space, but what comes out is a pained grimace and I go hide in the bathroom for a while. I'm happy and relaxed and just enjoying my time with friends, but someone asks me if I'm feeling okay because I'm not smiling and laughing.

My sensory sensitivities feel very interwoven between neurodivergence and animality too. My love for the sensations of wind and flowing water and warm sunlight. How jittery I get around loud noises and loud human voices, to the point that I don't even like raising my own voice. How quickly my battery runs out at large crowded events, how overstimulated I quickly become about being touched.

Walking through alleyways, taking shortcuts into overgrown empty lots, strolling into a claustrophobic corner store for a small break from the summer heat by the drink fridge. Learning the best bus routes to avoid the tourist crowds, getting to know the subway schedule by heart.

Coyote loves sitting in a quiet shady corner of a busy park and eating a greasy sandwich from the local shop for lunch, and coyote kind of likes the smell of beer and sweat and other bodily fluids that wafts out of busy bars on summer nights. Coyote watches hungrily when the rabbits are out nibbling on people's gardens in the early mornings, and coyote quietly protests every rat not chased when they scurry along the sidewalk at night. Coyote wants ice cream for dinner even when its vegan and teriyaki for dessert even when its been in the fridge for a day (or two) too long, and coyote wishes he had just a little bit less impulse control at the farmers market when the fresh fish are out.

Maybe this is part of why I don't draw as strong a delineation between human and animal as some therians do, nor reject humanity as strongly as some do. The coyote in me is animal and yet delights in humanity, wants to sniff around and make a practical home in the margins beneath blackberry brambles and concrete rather than dream fruitlessly of an idealized life in human-untouched wilderness. The wilderness doesn't have teriyaki.

Of course, I love “the wilderness” too, but I recognize how much the idea of wilderness is a constructed concept that's, paradoxically, deeply wrapped up in human perception. So many “untouched” places have been stewarded by human hands for thousands of years. So many wilderness documentaries of far off lands are a camera behind which sits an extensive film crew and bustling roads and towns full of human life.

I think it's more just the scavenger in me instead, wanting to sniff around under muddy rocks and peer hungrily into life-filled puddles. It makes me wish my eyes and nose were closer to the ground, that my back wasn't complaining after a couple hours of crouching down and bending over.

Having a cat around 24/7 for the first time in my life has been a learning experience, both on a practical level and on a nonhuman level. I've always loved cats and enjoyed spending time around them, but that time was limited in childhood because my father was allergic and in adulthood due to not being in a stable enough housing or financial situation for a pet until recently. I grew up with dogs and love them too, but always figured that I would vibe much better with a cat at home given my sensory issues.

Parts of that assumption have proved false while others have stood the test of cat ownership, and overall it's an enjoyable experience, but the difference in expectation vs experience has had me questioning my identity in the past few months.

For the last few years I'd kind of settled into thinking of myself as a feline therian but canine hearted. My connection to coyotes has been the longest lasting and most important part of my identity for the past twenty odd years, but part of me always felt that cat was more of at the core of who I am and coyote was a hearttype that threaded through my more everyday and archetypal experience but didn't run as deeply.

I've been coming to realize though that I think the truth is probably more the opposite. What I connected with in felininity was more it's outward archetype, while I find the actual day to day of feline existence rather alien. There are similarities and a great deal of empathy there sure, but not the easy instinctive Knowing that I experience with canids even when they're of the varieties that are too bubbly and social to be altogether comfortable for me.

Which brings me to watching birds out the window with my cat. Both of us engaged in the same fascination and a similar hunger - I'm both a birder by hobby/appreciation and an animal who sees small moving animals and considers them instantly as tasty little treats, for all that I don't act on that except in a more formal hunting/gathering capacity. There's so much commonality between us in this and a million other little moments, and I've never seen a domestic dog do anything like this.

Yet it's like we speak a different language while doing the same thing, two approaches to a much older predatory instinct. Perhaps the commonality all along was less the species itself and more the greater proximity of cats to non-domestication, their continued sense of measure and practice in pursuit of prey that no longer exists in the excited prey-driven dog bounding loudly after a squirrel in the park.

I see sentiments sometimes in the nonhuman community to the effect of wondering or lamenting how wild or captive animals, especially our theriotypes/kintypes, relate to us if we ever encounter them. But what I think about a lot is how my journey as a nonhuman informs how I relate to animals.

I kind of see myself in a permanent state of questioning - while I don't find the back and forth about what "makes" me believe I'm a coyote or a puma or some kind of bird thing terribly interesting, I tend towards more mundane psychological explanations, which leads me towards thinking of putting a specific species on what I experience as less an exercise in uncovering the One Truth and more an exercise in narrowing down many equally viable possibilities towards one that just feels the most right. This means that for most of my life (I've known I was nonhuman since my early teens, first starting lurking in therian spaces in the Livejournal days) anytime I've looked at a new animal there's been a little checklist I go through in my brain about it, comparing it to my internal experience, and wondering about ITS internal experience.

This has led me down a lot of interesting rabbit holes. What does it actually feel like to have eyes on the side of your head, or to have a beak or gills, or to have a bird-like respiratory system? Am I equipped to know that or do I just take it on faith when those things do or don't feel like my internal experience? I know I'm some broad-winged soaring bird because when the wind passes through my fingers just so I feel like I could tip my pinky and gently turn through the air while barely having to move another muscle. But what does it feel like for a whale to be so encased in blubber that an arctic sea that would pretty much instantly kill me feels just right? Does meat smell different to a canine nose than to mine? How would I manage my breathing if I went for my morning run on four legs instead of two? Does a manta ray feel curiosity or surprise when it encounters a human diver? Do crows tell each other about their days when they go back to roost for the night?