HOW WOULD I BECOME

I am in mild pain most of the time. Sometimes, the pain becomes intense. These flare-ups can leave me unable to get out of bed even to refill a cup of water without difficulty. I get migraines, gastrointestinal pain, muscle and joint pain, especially around my neck and legs. My joints overextend themselves with ease. I am extremely flexible, but there is a cost. Diagnosis is slow and frustrating. 

I am mildly anxious most of the time. Sometimes, that anxiety becomes intense. Sometimes, it is entirely irrational. These flare-ups can leave me bedbound, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe. I have imagined scenarios that are completely invented; I have experienced hallucination, meltdown, and verbal shutdowns. My diagnosis is complicated and I am not sure it is entirely correct. 

I find leaving the house difficult. I find physical exertion difficult. I find these difficulties stifling and painful. I have been in my current job for just shy of two years, and it is the longest job I have ever managed to hold down. It’s part-time, so money is always tight. I am lucky to have a good support system. Even still, I find pretty much everything I do to be a challenge. I have sensory issues. I have difficulties socially. I don’t make the right faces, don’t make eye contact, have to sit down often and avoid crowds. I want to feel stronger; I want to look different. I know exercise would help, but exercise is so difficult I have to go slower than I would like. 

When we imagine transformation, I think a lot of the time we are imagining a scenario that is painful while it happens, but which ultimately leaves us with a new, ‘functional’ body and altered but ‘functional’ mind. But I have wondered, many times, what my body would feel like if it were made canine. What it would be like to inhabit such an anxious and rigid mind within that body. 

Anxious dogs are often reactive and considered aggressive. I think the same is true for me; I have been working on being friendlier, less short, and engaging more proactively. I think, however, that many people are put off by me for reasons they cannot pinpoint. I have been told I am aloof, I am unsettling, I am rude. I have been told these things during both interactions I had thought were positive and going well, and during interactions I could sense were ‘failing’. I imagine being in a canine body would be much the same; a dog who looks up at you from rolling whale-eyes; who cringes and growls when you reach out a hand to touch it; is not a dog considered ‘good’ or ‘friendly’. 

The ways in which people respond to animals who attempt to establish boundaries with them always blows my mind. People who don’t like cats because they ‘don’t show love’; dog trainers who advise owners to ‘do the opposite of whatever the dog wants to show them who writes the rules’; people who complain about fish and bugs as pets because you ‘can’t handle them’. There is a level of entitlement towards animal bodies that I think parallels the entitlement I have experienced levelled at me in my trans, neurodivergent and aching human body. My mother, who complains I won’t let her touch me ‘even though’ she is my relative. Governmental restrictions on the changes I am ‘allowed’ to make to myself. The therapist who explained to me that working on making ‘appropriate’ eye contact was more important than alleviating my anxiety around social interaction. 

Wolfdogs/wolf hybrids especially are often considered aloof or aggressive as a by-product of that entitlement. People want a wild animal who will not bring wild behaviours into their home. I feel like that in my human body - I don’t fit neatly into most places, though I am expected to. It makes me wonder; if I could step into the canine body I imagine most fitting for myself, what would happen to me? Would I be kept, or destroyed? Would my anxiety and need for boundaries and particularities transfer over and make me snappish and scared? If I were released to other wolves or hybrids, would I be able to read them and engage with them socially? Even if my behaviour was tolerated, by human or wolf, would my body be? 

If we assume the change would alter my species but keep all the specifics of my body intact, I would go through a painful and drawn out sloughing off of my slow and aching human form, blood and tissue destroyed and remade, bone broken and reshaped, only to end up in a furred and quadrupedal simulacrum of the same old aches and pains. Who would want a wild animal with behavioural issues and a broken body? Would a pack care for me? 

That said, being wanted is already a challenge I deal with in my human body. Discomfort is already a challenge to me as a human. I think, despite the pain of the change, then the pains of the old body transferred, I wouldn’t mind. I could still run faster. I would still be the right shape. My eyes would be the right colour. 

At least some of my current discomfort would be alleviated by being in the right shape, and perhaps my canine form would allow me more resistance to pain, a little more durability. Perhaps being the right shape would make me far less anxious, far less people-pleasing. Perhaps wolf social cues would be much more fitting and comprehensible to me than human ones. I’ve heard it said that wolves have many ‘cat-like’ social behaviours; that people who meet them find them much more cat-like than dog-like compared to what they expected. I think people experience that same disconnect with me; that same mismatch between expectation and reality of interaction. There is something off-putting about me to a lot of people. 

But I think I’m okay with that, whatever shape my body. I like to think that, were I made canine tomorrow, I would retain most of my Self. I like to think that, were I made canine, I would get along with other canines, and that my human lack would no longer haunt me. I think transformation is often considered a fantasy of wish-fulfilment. For me, it is more about two things: reality, and hope. 

When I think about becoming another shape, it is because I already feel as though I should be that shape. I have an experience of feeling as though I am that shape. The transformation would be a clicking into place; a sliding of something into its correct position. A realigning of something I already know to be true. The hope is that there is a future for me wherein I am accepted, and my shape and lifestyle match the ones I yearn for as closely as possible. I want to draw a map over the one I'm travelling now, and make them overlay as much as I can.

And I am building that future. It is a work-in-progress, a constant project. The Self is not something that can be constructed overnight. Which is to say, this isn’t me coming to some grand conclusion about The Body; rather, I’m tentatively extending the tentacles of my thought into what it would be like to be In the body I half-inhabit. That body is inextricably linked to pain for me, and this is all to ask: in what ways, specifically? I’m sure I will come back with more thoughts and elaborate on the wider conversation of transformation and pain/disability/neurodivergence, but for now, this is just a brief reflection on tactility and my shape. 

THIS PAST FULL MOON

This past weekend was very intense for me compared to past moons. I had an experience unlike anything I've felt so far.

I went into work Saturday morning and my spine felt like it wanted to unwind itself through my back. I was restless and snappish and (as usual, I am very bad at tracking my moods etc in general and especially around moontime) not really thinking about the moon. Work is super quiet right now because it's summer break and I work weird hours (starting before 8am, over weekends), but I found even the quiet wings of the mostly-empty building too much. The rooms were too confining, what little noise was made felt like a jackhammer breaking into my skull, and my coworkers (who I love!) were overwhelming me with their presence.

There are staff bathrooms a floor above where I work. You have to go up two flights of stairs and then down a long corridor that has the weirdest vibes. The building is 100 years old and kind of peeling, but it's not even that that makes it feel weird. I think it's that, on weekends, you pass all the admin and teaching offices and they're all locked and empty, but you can hear the noise from the foyer amplified weirdly up into the corridor. There are little windows you can look down at the entrance from, and see the huge carved doors and the huge carved ceilings.

I was downstairs working, but I kept confused by things that are never usually a problem for me. My muscles felt wire-tight. I was thinking what it would be like to bite into something and taste blood. I felt fur rise along the back of my neck, my shoulders. Uh oh, I thought: I need a minute. I took myself up the stairs to the staff bathrooms. I loped along the corridor and looked down briefly at a tour group coming into the entrance hall and I felt something go click in my brain. My teeth were sharp, and no longer human. I felt myself trying to drop to all fours. At the end of the corridor I locked myself into the bathroom, and breathed.

There is a nest of pigeons outside the window of the bathroom. I couldn't see anything beyond vague shapes as they moved behind the frosted glass, but I could hear them. My head felt like someone had placed a rubber band around its top and it was being squeezed, like those watermelon videos you see on youtube. I kept thinking what it would feel like to catch one of those pigeons. My thighs began to spasm; I watched the muscles twitch. My spine felt so tight I couldn't bear it anymore so, with my mouth hanging open and breathing hard, I lowered myself onto the gross floor and stretched out. My eyes were watering; I am sure I felt my tapetum lucidem grow in. There was a long, endless moment on the ground, listening to pigeons, watching my own warped reflection in the tile and seeing something different in my eyes, and feeling my muzzle, my teeth, my fur. There was another body drawn from my human one, and it was canine. I had fur. My legs were wolf legs. I think minutes passed, then, there was a lot of noise in the corridor outside; a big tour group was coming up the back staircase.

They were loud and echoing off the tall ceilings and I cringed and tried to be still and silent as they passed by. Something about that (maybe fear, I don't know - fear usually makes me more canine rather than less) kind of brought me back to the forefront of myself. It wasn't that I felt like I was necessarily in control of bringing myself back, more like my body was reacting before I was and pulling me with it, like how I've felt before coming out of panic attacks. My brain was still foggy as I took myself back down the long corridor, lights flickering on above me, head and heart pounding.

I spent the end of my shift hidden in the stacks tapping at my phone without really engaging much until my owner came to get me. At home they made dinner for me, which I ate like I was starving. All I wanted was chicken. After, I went to lie in bed and just feel my body. I took pictures of the moon, bright and huge; I thought that they were a little blown out from the light but I didn't realise until today how out of focus they were. My hands were shaking and my brain felt bruised while I was taking them. When I went back to bed to sleep it off, I left the curtains open. The moon was so bright.

In its light I felt myself change again, and lying there I felt peaceful and alert together, in a similar way to the last time I changed like this. The canine chalk outline was drawn over me. I could wag my tail. My feet were tingling, and then they were not human feet. I felt my muzzle and teeth and fur, and the flat barrel of my chest. I fell asleep that way, but I don't remember my dreams.

On Sunday it was a little less intense; I felt like shit when I woke up, and going into work was a struggle to say the least. I was exhausted and smushed. I opened up the library and as my coworkers arrived I still felt raw and shaky, like something newborn. I felt bad; I was vulnerable and I wasn't quite in total control of myself yet. All day I felt vaguely wrong at the points of my angles. My head ached and my leg and arm muscles were tight and felt inflamed. My hands wanted to curl into claws or paws or I don't know what.

At home after work I was lounging around and I told my owner I could feel fur across my shoulders and neck. They petted at it, and I told them I could feel it grow down my back when they touched it. They told me I was a good dog, and I felt so small and raw but also so happy to have self-actualised and also a little grim for reasons I don't really understand.