Not If You Ask the Right Questions | Otherkin General Discussion | Forums

I think I’ve asked most of mine, so far.  At least the ones I’ve thought of.  I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for years, trying to puzzle out what the right questions are.  I was still living in Jersey the first time I thought of it in terms of trying to figure out the right questions.

One of the things I learned was that it’s almost useless to ask how you know if you’re otherkin or not.  Asking that gets you comparing lists of supposed traits for different otherkin types against yourself, which doesn’t really get you anywhere.  Do you like meat because you’re a dragon, or is steak just really tasty?  Do you recycle because taking care of nature is the Elven Thing To Do, or just because you prefer not wasting things?  Not every trait you have stems from a nonhuman lifetype, and I’d be willing to bet that not every member of that species (incarnated as that species or incarnated as human) shares the traits we’ve associated with them in the first place.

Instead, I’ve found it more useful to ask this: what is your point of relation with the Other?  Finding that allows you to explore the connection much more deeply than any list of traits will, and can help you decide things such as if you had a nonhuman past life or if you just feel an affinity for certain nonhuman beings.  That lets you work with things, and even deepen the relationship, rather than passively justifying your own tendencies as signs of being Other.