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In all honesty, reading through these awakening stories (Jarin’s, but also the ones on the old ORC) kind of makes me sad. Not because I don’t like them, but because I feel like they’re so different from mine. And that makes me feel like maybe I was wrong about the whole thing from the start. Or like I’m dumb and there’s something glaringly obvious that I just can’t see. 

My childhood was…complicated. A little overly sheltered, sometimes troubled in parts, but mostly I was happy and well cared-for. I don’t know if I always had a feeling of being “different”. I do remember sometimes feeling a little alienated or dissatisfied with the answers to my questions in the religion I was raised in – especially as I kept getting older, I was a kid who had questions about life that the adults around me didn’t always seem to be interested in. My parents were, still are, conservative Christians (dad in particular.) Even though they didn’t want me to go to public school or anything like that, we were close to my mom’s parents, who were (and still are) kind of agnostic/atheist. 

I grew up in the suburbs during the onset of the stranger danger era, so I wasn’t one of those kids who would play outside in the woods and talk to fairies or whatever. I don’t remember early psychic or magical experiences. Internet was dial-up, and we seldom had cable TV. 

As far as I can recall, I think I was around 12 when I became interested in elves, and I had this fantasy of…like…turning myself into an elf through the power of the mind. Sometimes I would pinch the tip of my ear in hopes that it would become pointed, or late at night I’d close my eyes and try to “will” my hair color to change, and just stuff in that vein. Looking back, I don’t really know what to make of it. I don’t know if it was a normal part of the early awakening process, or if it was a remnant of a past life where I could change my shape, or if I was just being an awkward wishful kid who wanted to be beautiful, the way some girls later succumbed to vampire-mania during the Twilight craze. 

Today I don’t really know anymore. Over the years I’ve talked with some interesting folks, had some unique experiences sampling different Elenari energies at gathers, had confirmation from others that I scan that way to them. But unlike Jarin and Arhuaine, and others, I have not been able to remember. I don’t know if I’m not “real” or just different. Or maybe I wasn’t really born into this body but instead walked-in at some point and I have that type of amnesia that technobushi mentioned. I don’t know what went wrong where I seemed to start waking up and then couldn’t anymore, unless I’m just a big fat wannabe. 

I also don’t really have a strong sense of what my soul’s trajectory here on Earth has been over multiple lifetimes, or how I ended up here in the first place. 

I wish I had a better, happier awakening story to tell. I would say “maybe someday”, but after all these years I’ve lost the optimism I used to have about that. I don’t fully fit either in the mundane world or in the otherkin world (which, to be fair, in 2020 is not always an entirely bad thing.) But I wish I did. Sorry for the necropost.