From the essay shelf
Living With the Ache
My classroom is on the second floor of an old brick school, and its windows look across the playing field to a line of tall poplars where, every year since I started there, a pair of ravens has nested. I teach science to twelve-year-olds. I am good at it, I think, and I am fond of them. And about once a week, in the middle of explaining something perfectly ordinary, I glance out of the window, see one of those birds come off the poplars and tip sideways into the wind, and feel something in my chest close like a fist.
The children notice. "Mr. Elderbank is doing the window thing again," one of them said last spring, not unkindly. I told her I was checking the weather. In a sense I was.
I am a raven therian, and the thing in my chest is what the community calls species dysphoria. I want to describe it honestly, because it is usually described either too grandly or not at all, and then I want to say what has helped.
What it is like
For me it lives mostly in the shoulders and the hands. My shoulders feel as though something should be folded along them, a weight and a span that is not there, and when I watch a bird open its wings I feel the absence the way you feel a missing stair in the dark. My hands, which are perfectly good hands and write a tidy board, sometimes feel like borrowed tools: too many separate fingers where there ought to be one long reach of feather.
There is a quieter version that is not in the body at all. It is a kind of homesickness for the air, felt most on hills and in high rooms and on windy days: a pull outward and upward, and then the flat knowledge that the pull goes nowhere. And there is the plain, wearing part, the low background sense on bad weeks that I am wearing the wrong coat and cannot take it off. That is the part that makes me tired.
What it is not
It is worth saying what it is not, if only to myself. It is not a belief that my body is changing, or ought to be changed. I know what my body is; I have lived in it for forty-one years and I take it to the dentist. It is not a diagnosis. Species dysphoria is a word the community made for an experience many of its members describe, not a condition a doctor will find in a manual. And it is not the whole of being a therian. Plenty of therians feel it rarely or never, and are no less what they are. I wish someone had told me that when I was nineteen and thought the ache was the proof.
What helps
None of what follows is a cure. It is a list of things that, over twenty years, have made the ache smaller, or rarer, or easier to carry.
Naming it when it comes. When the fist closes at the window, I say to myself, quite plainly: there it is. It sounds too simple to matter. It matters a great deal. An ache that has been named is weather passing through. An ache that has not been named tends to turn into a story about how my whole life is wrong.
Height and wind, in small doses. On Saturday mornings I walk up the hill behind the town, early, when the ravens are moving. Standing at the top in the wind with my arms at my sides does not give me wings. But it gives the shoulders something to do, a long cold pressure against them, and I come down lighter.
Doing what ravens do, in a human way. Ravens are, by every careful account I have read, endlessly curious. They play, they work at problems, they talk among themselves in a great variety of sounds. A good part of my job is those things. I suspect that part of why I teach is that a room of twelve-year-olds trying to work out why a candle goes out under a jar is the most raven-like place I know.
Rationing the looking. There was a winter when I watched films of birds in flight every night, for an hour, sometimes two. I told myself it was a comfort. It was not; it was pressing on a bruise. I still watch them, but in daylight, and not when I am already low.
Sleep, food and walking, which I put last because they are dull, and first because they work. My ache is markedly worse when I am tired. Yours may be too.
One person who knows. My partner knows. She does not try to fix it. On a bad evening she will say, "Is it the wings?" and I will say yes, and she will put her hand flat between my shoulder blades for a moment, exactly where the weight should be. I cannot tell you why that helps. It does.
When it is heavier than that
I want to be direct here, as I would be with one of my students. Some years ago there was a winter when the ache did not come and go. It stayed. It sat on everything. I stopped walking up the hill, stopped wanting to teach, stopped answering my friends, and began to feel that there was no point in a life lived in the wrong shape. I did not call it depression at the time. I called it dysphoria, because that was the word I had, and because that word made it sound like something I simply had to bear.
It was not something I had to bear alone. I went to my doctor, and then to a counselor, and told the counselor rather nervously what I am. She did not need to understand therianthropy to help me, and to her credit she did not pretend to. What she understood was a man who was not sleeping, not eating properly and not seeing anyone, and that turned out to be the part that needed help. The ache did not vanish. But the floor came back under it.
So: if your ache is heavy, or constant, or growing, or if it has begun to come with thoughts of not wanting to be here at all, please talk to a doctor or a counselor, and soon. You do not have to explain everything, or use the community's words. "I have felt wrong in myself for weeks and it is not lifting" is enough to begin with. If you are ever in danger, contact emergency services or a crisis line where you live. The page on wellbeing and care has more on finding the right person.
The other side of it
I will end where I began, at the window. On most days now, when a raven comes off the poplars, what I feel is not the fist but something else: a lift, a recognition, a sense of being for a moment exactly the right shape after all. The community has a word for that too, species euphoria, and it is as real as the ache. I did not expect, at nineteen, that the two would come to share the same window. They do. On the good days the children have to say my name twice.
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.