On why I am wind-aligned

When I first started feeling like I might be a dragon when I was a young adult, one of the first questions I asked myself was:

"What kind of dragon would I be?"

At first, I assumed I would be a more “traditional” western dragon. You know, the kind that breathes fire. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that something about that image didn't feel right to me. Fire wasn't something I ever felt particularly connected to.

So instead of trying to decide what I wanted to be, I started thinking about what I had been like as a hatchling. When I was little, I genuinely felt like I could control the wind. Some days I still think I do. I remember moving my hands through the air and having this strange but very natural feeling that I could feel the wind there... That there was something I could interact with and influence.

Looking back at it years later, it was one of the things that made the idea of being a wind dragon feel much more natural than being a fire-breathing dragon. I also always felt drawn to white dragons. There was something about white scales that felt right to me, and when I combined that with my connection to the sky, air and wind, the image of a white wind dragon started forming.

When I eventually discovered the otherkin community though, I still had no idea what I actually looked like. I didn't have memories of a past life that could tell me what species I was, what my body looked like, or what kind of dragon I had been. So I couldn't just look back and say: “This is what I was". Instead, I designed a wind dragon named "Swind" based on the things that resonated with me: White scales, colors and accents that reminded me of the sky, and features that felt right.

Later, through meditation and spending more time exploring my identity, I was able to get a much clearer sense of my actual appearance. And surprisingly, a lot of what I had intuitively designed beforepaw ended up matching what I experienced. One of the most meaningful confirmations for me happened during an in-dragon group meditation at a Gather in Düsseldorf, Germany. During it, I experienced myself breathing wind rather than fire, or nothing at all. That experience was especially significant because wind wasn't just something I had chosen because I liked the aesthetic. It was something that had been present in my experiences long before I knew there were other beings who described themselves as elemental or nonhuman in similar ways.

Some beings might notice that my dragon form looks quite a lot like Cynder, the dragoness from the The Legend of Spyro trilogy, just with the colours changed, and wonder if that influenced my identification as a wind dragon. From where I come from, wind dragons just.. look like this. The resemblance to Cynder isn't what made me identify as a wind dragon. It's a result of the fact that her design itself is very close to what wind dragons from my world look like. This is also interesting in the context of The Legend of Spyro, since the developers have stated that Cynder was originally intended to be a wind dragon before her corruption by darkness. So to me, it isn't really that I look like Cynder. It's that she looks like a wind dragon, and the version of her that wasn't corrupted would essentially have been one herself. That's also why I don't consider my appearance to be a “Cynder-inspired” dragon form. The color swap and few changes to eyes, wings, wing claws and tail is just what makes my own appearance distinct.

That's why, when I say I'm a wind dragon, it doesn't feel like a label I picked for fun. It feels like something I gradually discovered~