From the essay shelf
Before You Name It
You have found a word, and the word has done something to you. Perhaps it went through you like cold water. Perhaps it only sat down beside you and would not leave. Either way you are here, late at night I expect, reading one page after another and feeling your whole childhood rearrange itself behind you.
I remember that week. I would like to tell you a few things I wish someone had told me, and the first is this: there is no hurry. I know it feels as though there is. It feels as though you must decide by Friday what you are, and which animal, and whom to tell. You need not. Whatever is true of you was true last year, when you had no word for it, and you managed. It will keep.
Write it down before you read any further
Here is the most useful thing I know. Before you read another essay, another list of signs, another stranger's confident account, take a sheet of paper and write down what you have actually experienced. Not what you think it means. Only what happened, as far back as you can remember.
The way you always sat. The game you played alone at seven. The thing you feel at the base of your spine when you are happy. The dream you have had three times. What your body does when a door bangs.
Do this first because, once you start reading, your memory will begin to tidy itself. It will find a phantom tail because you have read that people have them. It will promote a fondness for the night into an instinct. Memory is an eager assistant and wants very much to give you what you are looking for. The page you write tonight, before it has been coached, is the most honest witness you will ever have. Date it and put it away.
You are allowed to be wrong
I was a wolf for about a year. I was sure of it. Wolves were what the people I read were, and wolves were magnificent, and I wanted very much to be magnificent.
It was the small things that undid it. Wolves are creatures of the family, and I have always been happiest alone. My tail, when I paid attention instead of assuming, was short. I looked up, constantly, into trees. It took me another two years to say "lynx," and when I did, it was not a thunderclap. It was more like setting down something heavy that I had been carrying on the wrong shoulder.
I do not regret the wolf year. It was how I learned to look. But I would spare you the embarrassment of having announced it to everyone I knew.
Go and meet the actual animal
Read natural history, the dull kind with range maps and tables of diet. Watch long films in which nothing happens and an animal simply lives. The creature in your head is made of stories. The creature in the field is the one you may be, and it is stranger, plainer and more particular than any story. If you still recognize yourself after you know what it eats and how it sleeps and how unglamorous most of its days are, that recognition is worth something.
Keep it quiet for a while
You do not owe anyone an announcement. A thing that is still forming is easily bruised by other people's opinions, kind or unkind. Let it grow in the dark for a season, like a bulb. If it is real, it will still be there when you are ready to speak, and you will speak better for having waited.
And if it turns out to be something else
It may be that you are not a therian. You may find that you love an animal as kin and are not that animal, or that the word was a door into a room you were only meant to pass through. If so, you will have lost nothing. You will have spent some months paying close attention to who you are, which most people never do at all.
So: write the page. Date it. Go outside. Come back to the question in a month, and again in three. The guide to awakening has the practical steps, and the bench is there when you are tired of thinking. You have time. You have, I promise, a great deal of time.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.