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another starcatcher

Autumnal Worlds

Within systems, there can be so much diversity even among headmates! And it’s true that for many systems, all or most of their members are nonhuman in some way, shape, or form. This post is for all the nonhuman-heavy systems out there!

🐶 Shoutout to systems with members who are otherkin, copinglink, alterhuman, otherhearted, or identify as nonhuman in other ways!

🐛 Shoutout to headmates who are avian, amphibian, reptile, aquatic, invertebrate, alien, or other kinds of headmates who are often unrepresented in nonhuman spaces!

🐯 Shoutout to systems who have trouble understanding human language, culture, customs, or ways of life!

🦇 Shoutout to systems whose nonhuman-ness stems from psychosis, delusions, trauma, or something else that causes them difficulty in life!

🐰 Shoutout to systems who are collectively nonhuman, made up entirely of nonhumans, or have a nonhuman singletsona!

🐿 Shoutout to systems with lots of headmates who are introjects of objects or who are inanimate objects of any sort!

🌳 Shoutout to systems with lots of nonhumans who are plants, fungi, coral, sponges, or other sedentary creatures!

🧚‍♀️ Shoutout to systems with many members who are fairies, elves, vampires, angels, demons, dwarves, or other human-like creatures which are still nonhuman!

🐙 Shoutout systems with members who love being nonhuman and embrace their nonhuman-ness in different ways!

🐹 Shoutout to systems with members who are questioning if they may or may not be nonhuman!

🐈‍⬛ Shoutout to systems with lots of canid, dragon, or feline headmates! Your worth is not any less because you are a “common” nonhuman!

🪲 Shoutout to nonhuman heavy systems with members who don’t like being nonhuman, or whose nonhuman experiences are disordered!

🐬 Shoutout to headmates who have always been nonhuman, and to headmates who became nonhuman later in life!

We hope that each of you can find peace, comfort, and joy in your nonhuman identities. Life as a nonhuman may not always be easy, but it can be wonderful having your identity as something other than human affirmed by those in your life. We hope that every nonhuman reading this will be accepted unconditionally by their system and those who surround them!

Please remember that your physical appearance does not have to define you. It’s okay to wake up one day and decide you’re not a human anymore, or have never been one! And having a nonhuman heavy system does not make your system any less valid or make you any less of a vital member of the plural community. We hope you and your system can find ways to affirm each other’s nonhuman natures, and can learn to grow together and celebrate each other as the creatures and objects you are!

As I worked on a playlist for myself and my werewolf identity, I came across something that I had never noticed before: the way that the aesthetics I associate with my identity make me feel more out of place in my current life.

I associate my werewolf identity with, well, probably the same things most people associate wolves and werewolves with. Frigid cold mountain ranges, dark frozen forests of birch and pine, bubbling streams lined with fern and moss, the bugle of elk and growls of bears, the absence of humanity for miles upon miles - the cold, isolated wilderness of the north. Engaging with these aesthetics makes me feel euphoric and at home. You can imagine then how it feels to get offline and live in the burning hot ranch-land plains of Texas. There are no mountains here, no birch and pine, no rushing springs, no lush fern nor moss, no elk, no bears, none of it.

So what to do then when the comfort of my kind's home is locked away behind a screen or a hundred dollar plane ticket?

Well for a good while I contented myself with the answer "suffer". But y'know I really don't think that is the best solution. The feeling of discontent in your surroundings and intense species dysphoria actually feels, well, kind of romanticized in our community, like the suffering makes your identity more real, but I think for me what really makes my identity shine is bringing it away from the online world and into the real one, even if what is around me isn't exactly the environment I prefer. I think a better answer is to do what wolves and humans have always done best: adapt. There is no reason that I shouldn't romanticize the aesthetics of the land that I do have around me through a werewolf perspective. That's where the playlist I was working on comes in. All this kind of "clicked" in a way for me driving down a long ranch road at sundown listening to Prowler by Coyote Kid which I had just added to my playlist on recommendation without listening to it first. Its southern gothic vibes mixed with werewolfery caught my attention immediately, because I noticed what I felt in that moment was a kind of species euphoria usually reserved for visits to the mountains. I was at home in my species *and* my environment. The dark dusky skies darkening over fields of cattle and juniper forests, the scent of sun baked straw and dust warming my snout, the hot evening breeze ruffling my fur - it all suddenly felt like home.

That feeling did quickly fade, but it gave me a glimpse of the fact that I am capable of feeling at home here. That I can be just as much, or even more, of a werewolf when I'm enjoying this land as I am when I'm made miserable by it and my homesickness. So from now on I am going to try to embrace the aesthetics and activities of the place that I am, rather than the place I wish I was. I'll be the beast lurking in the ranch lands and along the country roads, the snarl from in the grass much to deep to be a coyote, the mysterious paw prints littering the dust of your destroyed barn. And I can treat living near humans the same way. I will never fit in with humans. I try not to get too misanthropic about it, but I just won't. That doesn't mean I can't exist on the fringes of their society. Infiltrator. Beast hidden in the crowd. I can wear their mask and be proud of my ability to do so. I don't have to feel crushed by it when I know I am always just biding my time to meet others of my kind and let myself free when I am alone.

I know it might seem strange for a simple shift of aesthetics to be so impactful, but in this community especially, aesthetics and symbolism are such a foundational building block of self image and of how you interact with the community itself. And I suppose even then really this is less about the shift in self image around aesthetics and more about the refusal to continue participating in the misery olympics of "how homesick and species dysphoric can I be".

Autumnal Worlds