from theatre school to therian

hi, zoe, thank u for using my asks :3c

im gonna use this silly ask as an excuse to talk about the entire history of me being animals, and my relationship to being animals

going to theatre school to become a tiger

when i was like 4 i was obsessed with being a tiger. i had a clip-on tiger tail i would find every single excuse to wear, and one day someone in my family said i should become an actor if i like being a tiger so much. im not sure what they meant by this? maybe that you can, like, play pretend if you start acting?
needless to say my disappointment was immeasurable when i went to theatre school and i never got to be a tiger. theatre school was fun though, although the teachers kept being sick so not much happened with that. maybe theres an alternate future where i became like really into theatre!

anyways. i cant remember why i wanted to be a tiger so bad. my memories basically start at the clip-on tail.

like a lot of things, this was one of those things i just kind of had to throw away as i got older, because i wanted the cool kids to like me. so there were a lot of years there where any animals feelings were completely thrown away.

finding out im trans

then, many many years later, i found out i was trans. and its weird how finding out you're trans changes so much, but it made me interact on the internet in a completely different way than before. tumblr stopped being a silly thing i scrolled sometimes, or a place where i learned the latest News. it became a place i was safe to experiment with my identity.
later i moved to twitter, and twitter, too, became a place where i experimented with my identity. and it was on twitter that i started following a lot of trans women who were cats. for the first time, i was in a space where its almost weirder to not be going "meoww nya nya :3c" all the time. it was cool! despite all the things that made twitter awful, at least that was good.

and then even later i went on the fediverse, and the fediverse was also full of animals!!!

at this point, i'm happy to go nya nya and call myself a catgirl, but i still wouldnt call myself "the kitty", or "tiger". so what happened next?

meeting zoe

zoe is my girlfriend (and also the one who sent this ask that im answering :3)

i met her on the fediverse. i was trying really hard to make the fediverse work, so i was frequently browsing The Global Timeline. that was where i saw her, and it was true love at first sight. ok, no, maybe not, but i did see her posts and i thought "haha this person is funny" and then i followed her. and then ensued like several months of the two of us being the most clueless lesbians in the world, both hopelessly crushing on the other but being incredibly awkward about it. we got married in stardew valley and we talked about how it would be cool to live together someday and spend the rest of our lives together, but we somehow didnt realize that the feelings were being reciprocated!!! thats not really what this post is about though!

zoe is a bat. and zoe likes to meow. these are things that are true about zoe, and that i love about her. up until this point, there was no one in my life who was, like, encouraging me to actually go fully in on being animals. it was always sort of like a "yeah haha im a catgirl" but never like "im literally a cat"

but zoe became that person who encouraged me. i guess it was more just her being like "oh you're a cat right?" and i just went "yeah :3". and then i became the most cat i had ever been.
it was a little bit later that this would make me, like, completely recontextualize me going to theatre school to become a tiger when i was really young. suddenly i didnt think of this as solely a silly thing i did when i was a child, and that was when i became a tiger :3

at this point i still had no clue what being "therian" meant though. i had heard the term otherkin before, but it was when i was 14 on tumblr and lets just say that wasnt the best time to be learning about it...

toki pona

toki pona is a constructed language created by sonja lang. i could go on about its features, but barely any of that is actually relevant. heres the relevant bit:

in toki pona, when you say a name, you always precede the name with a word that describes what the name is. so like, germany is "ma Tosi", where "ma" means "land".
a person named "John" would become "jan San", where "jan" means "human", and "San" is how his name is adapted into toki pona.

the creator of toki pona didnt intend this, but toki pona is a language where you can easily, and without any friction at all, tell people you're therian. i go by "soweli Sika". any person who looks at my name in toki pona instantly knows that im a "soweli", which means animal. this seems to have given toki pona quite a bit of appeal with therians, and now you'll meet a lot of therians if you learn toki pona in the right spaces!

by the time i started learning toki pona, it was already a community full of therians, so i learned a lot about it from the toki pona community! it wasnt a very big step from that, and into slotting that understanding of therianness into my own experience of being animals.

when i started learning toki pona i was "jan Tesa", but nowadays im "soweli Tesa" or "soweli Sika", because there were so many others who were open about being a soweli that i felt safe to do the same! i appreciate the toki pona community a lot for that.

the end

that more or less brings us to where i am today. cohost was also important to me, because there were many therians there too, who gave me even more new perspectives, but there isnt much to say about it.

i hope someday that itll be more normalized to just go wild with your identity. your identity is meant to serve no one except yourself, and everyone deserves to identify however makes them happy. being happy and yourself will never be "bad" or "cringe" or anything else negative. its awesome.

tl;dr: i became the kitty by escaping the fear of being cringe, having fun with my identity, and accepting myself