Sometimes you lay plans for much longer than you realize. Sometimes you lay plans without having any idea where you're headed. Last weekend I finished laying a plan.
In late 2019 I felt a deep need to work out a new character. I churned this doe in my head for a few months before my partner illustrated her for me. It was the first time since designing the goopypanther that I made a character who felt like they were supposed to be "me".
I fell into her really hard during the pandemic, when all the things I had been using to cope evaporated overnight and it felt like the world was collapsing around me. I changed up my twitter, on a whim. Presented it under a thinly veiled and deflective narrative that I had been cursed to turn into a doe. Not my fault, nothing I could do. Normal stuff.
I think it was a solid year before I put anything back. Deeryear.
She's been there since then, an other self that didn't feel that distant. I thought about being her a lot.
It was mid march when I first stood in front of a mirror, late at night with a marker and added six dots in two rows down my abdomen. I stared at myself for a long time. It was the first time I remember thinking I looked cute in a mirror. I had never wanted ink on my skin so badly.
It somehow never occurred to me that this was something I could just do. I've kept them touched up since then, until I can make it permanent. All the years I had enjoyed those specific markings, gleefully linking to pictures on discord with a little "tee-hee, bellynips" I couldn't pass through the barrier and apply them to myself, physically or online. Something wasn't right yet. Something was about to be right.
In 2014 I had an RFID chip implanted in my body. I was in the woods at a computer hacker camping event. I wanted it for years and I suddenly had the opportunity to hand cash to a guy in a tent and make it happen right then, right there. It was something that you would give a dog. Something I could hold inside. A bit of my identity that was made a little more real, but still kept hidden. There was a space waiting for those bellynips the entire time.
The deer was the first VRchat avatar I uploaded, she just felt right. I don't know how long I spent staring at myself in the mirror that first night, sitting on the floor. Longer than I planned. It was the same feeling from months before with the marker: That was me.
I added the wolf bite scar the moment I figured out how. The implication was obvious: something had happened. Something had changed me. I know I felt changed.
Furality loomed and I was so excited. I wanted to do this for three years but I couldn't work up the courage to try. I set up my shader to make the bite mark glow, to mirror how brightly it lit up my mind. It was the weekend of the full moon.
On the second day I transformed in front of my friends while touching the scar. God, what a privilege. It was the first time I used that wolf avatar. The effects weren't perfect, hastily modified at 2 AM without testing but we got it working later that day. My teeth glowed just like the bite did.
I had never really thought about it before, that there were moments where I could know I was showing a part of myself for the first time. Those thresholds had always felt so much more diffuse than that.
Now I knew who left that bite. The story was never that linear to begin with.
And with that my narrative became epistemologically closed. Self supporting. The doe became the wolf who bit the doe and the conclusion was inescapable: Only we give ourselves permission to become who we want to be.
These characters that I imagined, and tweeted about, and daydreamed; all of them were me the entire time. Reflections of myself that I wasn't ready to let out of the mirror. Or maybe they were the ones I let out so I could stay behind the glass until the cracks started to form.
It can be hard to tell which side is which when you've been under so long, but once the surface shatters there are no sides anymore.
In the end, I just I had to take a chunk out of myself to make myself whole.
