My beginnings in the otherkin community

This is something I originally wrote for my personal website. Since it covers an important part of my journey in the community, I wanted to have it here as well.

I always felt different from other people. Not in the "I'm so different, look at me" kind of way, and not necessarily in a neurodivergent sense either. It was something more.. fundamental. I often felt like I was a different species from everyone around me. Many children pretend to be animals when they play, of course. But for me, it never really felt like pretending. I wasn't roleplaying. Expressing myself as something other than human felt very natural to me.

The first major change happened when I was around 16 or 17 winters old. I had moved to my human father, away from the abusive household I had grown up in with my human mother. For the first time, I had the space and freedom to actually look inward and explore parts of myself that I had previously kept hidden.

That's when I started experiencing phantom limbs! At first, there were wings. I would especially notice them on my way home while listening to music. They seemed to move along with the beat, almost like dancing. Eventually, I began feeling a tail, and later horns as well!
I never told anyone about it. I had already learned that some of the ways I behaved when I wasn't carefully "masking" myself could be unsettling to other people. I can't really blame them for that. Even now, part of me still finds some of it.. strange. Maybe that's just the human part of this brain, shaped by everything human society has taught me.

Oh, and then the covid pandemic. During the second major lockdown, a few days after New Year's Eve in 2021, I was staying at my grandmother's house. I couldn't sleep, so I was lying in bed and scrolling through my phone. As usual, I ended up looking at pictures of dragons, especially "The Legend of Spyro", a video game trilogy released between 2006 and 2008.
It had been a huge interest of mine for years. But that night, something felt different. While lying on my side and looking at the pictures, I could feel my paws. My claws. My tail. More and more of my dragon body was surfacing. And eventually, I had a thought:

"What if I search for this feeling I'm having? Maybe it's some kind of mental condition that can be treated?"

So I did. I opened my browser and searched for something like "Humans that feel like they are a dragon." The first result was a German wiki page about dragonkin. I clicked on it.

And I was completely shocked.

Until that moment, I had genuinely believed I was the only human being on Earth who felt like they were a dragon. I had never considered that there might be other people experiencing something similar. I remember sitting there in the middle of the night, staring at my phone while my grandmother slept beside me. I didn't really know what to do with what I had just discovered. But I knew I wanted to meet the others.

By that point, Discord had become quite popular, so the next morning after what I now consider my awakening, I started searching for dragonkin servers. I found several almost immediately. The first one I joined was "Dragon's Cove", which was a fairly large server for such a niche community. I remember being incredibly happy to finally meet other dragons.
I asked an almost ridiculous number of questions. I was nervous, excited and fascinated by the fact that I could finally talk to people about things I had previously kept entirely to myself. I think I spent several days like that. Eventually, I joined another server: Draconic Sanctuary. That server became my home for several years.

And from there, my real journey began. Through conversations with other dragons, especially discussions about phantom limbs, shifts, past-life memories and similar experiences, I gradually began putting the final pieces together when it came to the appearance of my dragonself.

Or... was it my true dragon self?

For the first time in my life, I had found beings who understood me. Dragons I could talk to about experiences I had never been able to explain before. But there was one thing that bothered me: Almost everyone seemed to have a past life. They had memories, stories and experiences from before their current life here on earth. I had.. nothing. And my dragonself was different from theirs. My appearance looked much more like a videogame character than what I imagined a dragon from mythology or some ancient past life would look like. I.. became embarrassed about it. I worried that I was somehow just a troll who had wandered into their community to make fun of experiences that were very real and meaningful to everyone else, and I didn't want that. I just wanted to belong. I wanted to find beings who shared the same struggles, the same feelings and the same longing to understand themselves. I had finally found dragons who seemed like they might be my kin, and I desperately wanted to be one of them.

The next several years after my awakening were therefore filled with doubts. I questioned myself constantly. I tried different identities. I compared my experiences with those of other beings and wondered why mine didn't seem to fit.

Eventually, I reached a point where I had to stop flying in circles. I sat down and basically begged my own brain to give me an answer. I told myself that everything would be okay even if the answer was that I wasn't what I thought I was. I broke myself down into the smallest pieces I could think of. I wrote down the phantom limbs I experienced. The behaviors and instincts I had. The things that felt natural to me. I compared them with the different identities I had tried over the years.
And somewhere inside, I think I already knew. With a little encouragement from the dragons who had become important to me, I began my journey again. But this time, I approached it differently. I wanted to be certain. I started making an effort to only tell people things about myself that I was genuinely confident in. I knew I would probably never be able to achieve absolute certainty about everything, but I wanted to try anyway. And, maybe most importantly, I stopped being afraid of saying:

"I don't know."

I realized that not knowing something doesn't make my experiences any less genuine.

Yes, I am a dragon. I can't give you a perfect explanation for why. I don't have memories of a past life. I don't have some definitive piece of evidence that could explain everything. What I have are my experiences. My meditations. My feelings. The way I perceive myself. This is how I look on the inside. This is who I am.

Maybe there is a psychological explanation for it. Maybe there is something entirely different that I haven't considered yet. But... It doesn't matter as much to me anymore. I know what I am, or at least, I know what I believe I am. And I know what I need to do going forward. I have to stay honest with myself and with other beings, especially when I don't have all the answers. I know this journey is nowhere near over. There will probably always be things I question, discover or reconsider. But for the first time, I'm genuinely confident about the future ahead of me.

I just hope that this time, I can stay true to myself, and not feel like I have to force myself into an identity just because I want to belong.