From the essay shelf
Not Every Feeling Is a Shift
I have described elsewhere the way I keep a shift journal, and I stand by it. What I did not describe there, because I was not yet ready to, is how badly I used it at first.
My first notebook has a narrow column ruled down the right side of every page, headed in careful capitals: SHIFT? For the first two months there is a mark in that column on very nearly every line. Restless after supper: shift. Could not settle to read: shift. Short with a man at the post office, and felt my ears go flat: shift. Woke at four and lay listening to the house: shift, strong. Reading it back now is like reading the diary of a man who believed that every change in the weather was a letter addressed to him personally.
It took the dull entries to teach me otherwise. This essay is about what they taught me, and about a kind of humility I did not expect to need.
The column I nearly left out
The last thing I recorded in each entry, almost as an afterthought, was the state I had been in beforehand: rested or tired, fed or hungry, calm or stirred up. I put it in because it seemed proper, the way one notes the wind beside the date of the first swift even when one does not expect it to matter.
When I sat down after three months with a pencil and counted, that afterthought turned out to be the most important column in the book. The restless evenings were, very largely, evenings on which I had eaten nothing since noon. The nights I lay awake listening were, more often than I liked, nights after a second cup of coffee at four in the afternoon. The flattened ears at the post office came at the end of a week in which I had slept badly, worried about money, and been short with two other people as well, without any help from my animal at all.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table feeling quite foolish. I had been taking hunger for instinct, caffeine for keenness, and plain bad temper for something wild. There is nothing wrong with hunger, coffee or bad temper. But none of them is a theriotype, and I had been writing them down as if they were.
What a shift is like, for me
I want to be careful here, because I can speak only from one notebook, and other people's experience is plainly different from mine. But over the years I have noticed that the entries I still trust, reading them back, have a different texture from the ones I have since crossed through.
A mood, for me, colors everything evenly, the way an overcast sky does. When I am tired, the whole world is tiresome: the street, the kettle, the conversation, my own hands. A shift does not work like that. It changes what I attend to, not how I feel about it. The world is not darker or brighter; it is rearranged. Sounds come forward. Faces go back. I find that my attention has turned, without my turning it, toward the gate, the stairwell, the field behind the houses, and that something I can only call ears has turned with it. It arrives, it changes the arrangement of things, and it leaves, and when it leaves I am neither relieved nor let down, only back.
That is as much as I would claim. It is a description of my own mental shifts and phantom ones, not a test for anybody else's.
The sandwich rule
Out of all this I have made myself a small rule, and I offer it with some embarrassment, because it is so homely. When I notice something and my first thought is "shift," I eat something, drink a glass of water, and wait half an hour. If I am cold, I put on a sweater. If it is late, I ask myself honestly whether I am simply tired.
If, after the sandwich, the thing is still there and unchanged, I write it in the column. If it has gone, I write what it was instead: hungry, cold, tired, cross. I do not count these as failures. They are perfectly good entries. A man who knows when he is hungry knows something useful about himself.
The rule has removed perhaps half of what I used to record. It has never once removed the ears. That is how I know the ears are worth recording.
Not an excuse
There is one more thing the notebook taught me, and it is less comfortable. Some of the marks in that first column were not merely mistaken. They were convenient. "Felt my ears go flat" is a more flattering account of being short with a stranger than "was short with a stranger." It lent my bad behavior a kind of dignity, as though it had come from somewhere old and blameless instead of from me.
I do not think I am alone in this temptation. It is very easy, once one has a word for an animal side, to hand it everything one would rather not own. But the animal is not a cupboard for one's faults. Whatever is wolfish or catlike or birdlike in any of us, the person who speaks sharply at the post office is the person, and the apology is owed by the person too. I went back, as it happens, and apologized to the man. He did not remember me at all.
What remains
None of this has made me doubt what I am. If anything it has done the opposite. Once I stopped counting the hungry evenings, what was left was smaller and much more solid, and it has kept the same shape for years. I would rather have a handful of entries I believe than a notebook full of marks I have to defend.
The humility I mean is not the kind that makes one small. It is the kind a field naturalist has: a willingness to write "I am not sure what that was" and leave it there. I keep a third column now, beside the other two. It is headed "Unclear," and in most months it is fuller than either of them. I have grown fond of it. It is the most honest part of the book.
If you are early in all this and every feeling seems to mean something, I would suggest only this: eat, sleep, wait, and keep writing. The guide to shifting describes what people commonly report, and your own notebook, given time, will tell you which of those reports are yours. And if a feeling that seems like a shift is really a pain, a fever or a low mood that will not lift for weeks, it belongs in a doctor's notes, not in this one.
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.