A reflection on alternative identities

[eclective]

But then, I strongly feel that when it comes to it, Otherkin don't really have that much room to talk about fic'kin, and furries don't really have that much room to talk about Otherkin. When it comes down to it, it's all variations on "I see something of myself/something that clicks with me/something that feels right to me in X, and that helps me

Comments

[sethrenn]

Probably the best term we've heard for how all these types of subjective experiences work-- otherkin, fictivity, bla bla etc-- is "unverifiable personal gnosis." We used to say "subjective experience" a lot, specifically with regards to multiplicity, and that's probably more understandable to the general public, but a lot of us really liked the "unverifiable personal gnosis" term. Regardless of what you ever might be able to prove or want to prove, or if you even care, about the literality of it, it's the personal emotional/spiritual/mythic/etc framework that makes sense of *your* life for you and helps you to live it better. You can't prove it anywhere that it can be measured or physically quantified, but on some level, because it makes sense of you and your life and the world, "I am a dragon" is a true statement. (Or "I am (insert whatever)"-- fill in the blank with whatever serves as a given person's UPG.)

And I think people who don't have a UPG, or whose UPG doesn't work quite the same way (for instance, if someone says to most of us "Jesus Christ is my savior and I have a personal relationship with him," or something similar, the majority of us will view it as UPG in the same way, not to say one type is better or worse than the other-- but as far as most of Western society is concerned, that's a socially acceptable thing to believe, even if you can't get any pictures of yourself having coffee with Jesus or whatever; and someone who has a socially acceptable UPG is usually not going to see how it has anything in common with a socially unacceptable one) often have this tendency to assume "I am" can only have one possible meaning. It's usually used in the context of what is obviously provable, such as "I am 29 years old" (or the body is, at least).

Putting aside people who just want to snark, we've noticed two reasons that seem to be behind at least *some* misinterpretation of various UPGs:

1) Teenagers particularly like to run off with theories and ideas that they may not entirely believe in-- they're just trying them on to see if it works-- but state those ideas, while they're playing around with them, as something they 100% believe in, heart and soul. (We're not suggesting teenagers are the only ones who do this, of course. We've known people who kept doing this well into adulthood, and it can get really frustrating when you don't know whether to take what they say seriously or if it's another idea they're playing around with.) And it isn't even always out of a deep desire for a UPG that they do this, in every case, but just because something strikes them as an interesting idea, or because it's popular with their friends. (Which isn't to say that everyone who claims to be otherkin/multiple/a soulbonder/etc online does it because "it's trendy," but we have very much seen things like everyone in a particular social group or mailing list claiming to have soulbonds because everyone else in that group/list/etc says they have them. As soon as it's no longer trendy, or community opinion shifts in the direction of "lol soulbonders are losers," all the soulbonds disappear overnight.)

2) People in general, when talking about personal gnosis, often don't distinguish between 100% committed completely literal belief and the "working understanding" they have of a thing. If everyone is more or less on the same level as you, about what "truth" means in this context, then there's no need to elaborate on it every time and explain that this is currently your working understanding/subjective experience/etc. In communities where a lot of people share a very similar personal gnosis, or have one aspect of it in common, there's often a tendency to talk about the working understanding in a way that makes it sound very literal. Not that this in any way *justifies* snark comments like "ha ha, if you think you can fly why don't you jump off a building" or whatever.

...but of course, when people have misunderstandings about it for those reasons, they tend to be open to being convinced that it's not what they originally thought. People who are just in it to snark won't even listen when you try to elaborate on how a certain UPG is actually more subtle than they're claiming it to be.