one of these days i’ll make an actual kinlist i suppose? a few are hard to pin down, so generalizations work for those, while a couple are a particular species. so for example, the most prominent would be “The Werewolf” as a creature and its many iterations. pretty broad, right? think of it this way: the snarling, howling beast that sheds its humanity and becomes one with the wild? that’s me. the werewolf who’s basically just a big dog in terms of behavior, who would kill to lay in your lap and receive pets? that’s also me. i’m the church grim that guides and protects the dead by night, and the priest who leads and comforts the living by day. i’m the king of the werewolves, whose wisdom flows so sweet, whose honeyed words can drop you into a trance if you let them, and at once the humbled royal, who learned old folk magic from the wild things and preserves its rituals and remedies, who is a loyal servant of the forest, the river, the living and the dead.

i’m the werewolf that inherits the curse/the blessing/the Way of Being from a bloodline, but also the one that gets scratched/bitten by another to force the change. i’m the one that’s given the power to shift by a goddess of the moon, or learns from the wild things, or gets caught stealing from the Good Neighbors and is punished accordingly. i’m the werewolf who gets captured and caged, and the one that gets away; the one picked apart by underpaid scientists and the one welcomed into the king’s court.

on some level, it’s psychological, like an identity built up upon metaphor. it’s my bipolar disorder, rapid-cycling, a pain in the ass and a genetic certainty from my father. it’s also the trauma i have from his abuse—echoes from his own father’s hand, and his father before him. it’s something that comes and goes like the moon cycles, like hypomania and depression and the blessed breaths between. yet it’s also what shifts in me when i’m overcome with rage, or with righteous anger. possessive lust, or protective love. uncontrolled mania, or healthy, normal excitement.

yet, it’s something more than that. it’s the way i exist in this world as a queer person, as a nonbinary butch, as a sapphic who goes by he/him, as someone who becomes invisible when pushed into a binary. i live in liminal spaces because it’s my nature. to call me “human” or “beast” without acknowledgement of the other is an insult. i break binaries. i complicate things. i frustrate closed-minded people because they want me to just pick a side. my sex is “depends on who’s asking.” my gender is “undefined.” my sexuality is “it’s gay when i love women.”

i experience phantom shifts, mostly uncontrolled but not always. sometimes it ripples through my body, like what you see in the more visceral werewolf films. sometimes it feels more like a natural body overlaid on top of my human one, like a comfortable extension of me.

that’s not even to touch on my practice with Hel and the werewolf motif that has permeated so much of that practice. this post is, frankly, long enough as it is. i’m gritting my teeth as i set aside all i’ve written about being a boundary-breaking, eclectic dedicant of Freyja. i hope that this might become a rough, rough draft for something more substantial i’ll write someday. who knows? if you’ve made it this far, i’d love to hear your thoughts.