I, or the Pnictogen Wing rather, has been grappling with a lot of serious questions about the nature of the collective. We haven't been exactly efficient about it, and we've been stumbling along with a lot of unanswered questions about ourselves. For such a long time, we were consciously aware of almost nothing. I remember dimly how much of our early life (in the present timeline) was spent in a kind of wide-eyed daze, doing what we were told and otherwise acting upon our impulses, and I think other people noticed that we had something considerably less than a full-fledged personality. School supplied us with our best approximation of a sense of self and place in the world, and after we moved to Seattle we soon came to feeling lost without it.
In the mid-2000s I discovered the furry subculture, after catching some tantalizing clues about it—most of them contemptuous. A key moment came from an incidental conversation at some drunken party, I recall, in which a couple of acquaintances described furries with such theatrical disgust that I was immediately prompted to think "maybe there's something in this." I suppose it's almost a reflex. Tell me about something forbidden and you'll get my interest right away. Thanks to furry subculture we developed our first sense of self who seemed...distinct, self-assured, a genuine expression of something we wanted. We weren't just a default person any more. We stuck with that first unicorn fursona, Monoceros, who then became Monophylos, for a long time. Mono's still with us, though he "died" for a while, or lost confidence in himself, or something. Our memories aren't the best. I wouldn't call Mono a "fursona" any more; he went galloping off in his own direction many years ago.
In mid-2016, though, we experienced an extremely disruptive event—something halfway between a lengthy hallucination and a gnostic vision, in which we were taken with extremely intense and ecstatic sensations that we interpreted as evidence of a dragonish sense of self. We were...let's shall we say, strongly influenced the people we loved and admired at this time: roughly in 2015-ish we started taking far more notice of otherkin subculture and making otherkin acquaintances, so the idea of being "dragonkin" was already in mind. The dragon vision was both overpowering and vague, and it ended up disrupting our lives and our sense of self quite badly. Other disruptions followed and we're still sorting out the mess but beyond doubt, the dragon vision (if that's even what it was) completely upended our sense of identity. When we created our fursonae Monoceros and Monophylos, we felt more or less in control of the details, just like anyone trying to decide what their fursona or OC ought to look like. This new sense of draconic identity did not feel like that. It feel like something powerful but unknown had taken charge of us, like Apollo descending upon the Sibyl, and what did that actually mean for us?
At the time we felt like it was almost necessary to change our online identity to that of a dragon, but...how, exactly? It felt wrong merely to assign an appearance and colors and so forth. Our first avatar representing the change was a quick sketch of a dragon head containing a '?' mark. Meanwhile we weren't sure what to do with Monophylos. We tried to convince ourselves that it was time to move on from the unicorn, but then Mono split off into a distinct sense of self with their own voice, which is what pushed us toward embracing a plural sense of identity. It didn't seem unnatural. Wasn't literature full of examples of people with a sense of duality, even if it was only a private sense of having an inner dialogue, like Shinji talking to himself in Neon Genesis Evangelion? It takes being inside Leliel to awake Shinji to the possibility that he's more than one person...
...huh. Maybe the dragon vision wasn't a dragon.
There was more I wanted to say and the tale feels extremely incomplete but I think that's enough for a post.
~Chara of Pnictogen
