Sometimes it’s weird being a draconic with a mostly psychological identity. I know I’m a dragon, the fire-breathing blue-scaled type with two wings and four legs, but what exactly a dragon is, even within this category, varies a lot depending on who you ask. There are a wide variety of draconic archetypes: feral non-speaking animalistic dragons; evil gold-hoarding human-devouring dragons; wise magical solitary dragons; and dragons who are just like normal humans in scaly suits. Since I have minimal past life memories if any, the way I figure out what sort of dragon I am (am, as even if I was a dragon in a past life, my draconity is what I experience now) is by gut feeling. Some parts of these draconic archetypes feel right to me, like that’s what I am, and others feel wrong. Sometimes this involves looking at my own personality, instincts, and behaviors and comparing, although this can be troublesome as some of these are possibly symptoms of mental health issues I have, and we all know that mundane issues shouldn’t be attributed to one’s draconity.
As a dragon, every representation I see of myself is filtered through legend or media. I’m able to look to Earth animal behavior too, but just as dragons are physically described as a mix of different Earth animals, so may we be in our nature. A lot of times, I and other dragons I’ve met have ended up using fiction as a way to explore our own identities, to look at (and often read) about dragons, and ask what they get right or wrong, and use that to figure out who we are. And sometimes, this process of feeling out what is right or wrong can be weird. I can feel that multiple conflicting archetypes are the right ones, or can have what feels right change over time. This raises a lot of questions about myself that I’m still exploring. If multiple archetypes are right, does that mean that I’m a fusion of them? Perhaps just as I change, what sort of dragon I am changes with me?
In some way, this seems a little bit silly. I am who I am, regardless of archetypes. Still, I feel like that’s too reductive an answer. I think that I who I am has been influenced by these archetypes somewhat over time. The relationship I had with them a decade ago isn’t the same one I have with them now: I can look at old writings I had about how dragons are actually peaceful and just misunderstood, which contrasts with how I feel far more animality and even perhaps “evil” now. Is it just that I embraced the dark and violent parts of my draconity, of myself that were always there? Or have I changed over time? I think it’s probably some of both.
An alternative is to accept all of these archetypes, to accept that they are all an inherent part of my draconity, even if sometimes they conflict with each other and if I experience instincts and have behaviors that don’t always make sense together (whether spiritual or psychological or both in origin). Perhaps they could be caused by different past lives as different dragons, but even so, this is my experience now, and who I am now is not one of separate kintypes but one of a singular draconity. I myself encompass multiple draconic archetypes and different conflicting natures, but as a one dragon.