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i laid myself out, stretched and comfortable. i felt hind paws grow in twitching, like a dog half-asleep. my legs twisted and pulsed until canine. my hands were long-knuckled paws. i could feel the mane along my neck and shoulders. my mind was quiet, alert instinct. i was peaceful. i knew if i could see my eyes, they would be mine, and they would not be mine. i laid like that for a long time, listening to the storm, and feeling my wolf body. there were two shapes in me; my top half mostly human, my lower half all wolf. my tail was draped over my legs; i could feel it at my coccyx, and i could feel it against my legs.
like meditation, like pain, like a hard run, i was both beyond myself and wedged firmly in my own body. i was a wolf, and i was more at peace with the between-form feeling than i have ever been before.
the wolf has buzzed beneath my skin since then, and walking through the city at dusk, i felt my teeth. i felt aware of my body, of my surroundings, like the wolf was more keyed-into things than human me. i'm feeling a lot lately, rolling around in the mess of discomfort, and liking what rubs itself into my pelt.
how will i continue to transform? i'm ready to find out.
it was fourish days of constant low-grade wolf feelings, interspersed with big spikes. the most intense was on the third day. i went for a run and spiked BIG. my hands were tight, clenched like claws and i couldn't unfurl them. i was curved in on myself, shoulders trying to drop me to all fours in the dirt. my muzzle was there, and my mouth hung open. my gums prickled with teeth, and my jaw cracked and every movement. my legs were like piano wire, their muscles twitching under my touch. it was real. it was really happening. i rounded the corner and looked up, not knowing what i was looking for, and there it was: the beaver moon, huge and yellow, hanging over the city. it slid out from behind a cloud just in time for me to catch it, then darted away again.
i made my way home in a haze; speech was difficult; forming thoughts beyond a sort of alert but relaxed fug of instinct was difficult. at home i flopped onto my bed in the dark and breathed. and i realised just how much i stand in my own way. i was fighting it, i realised, trying to force my way back to humanity. so i tried to let myself go, and i felt my feet, the soles splitting open. i tossed my head and felt the thick mane of fur along my neck and shoulders. i felt my skin ripple in a cutaneous trunci reflex. i took myself into the bathroom, and i looked into my eyes. i have avoided looking myself in the face during previous changes because i was afraid to be disappointed. but they were bright and wild and there was an expression there that i didn't recognise in myself but that relieved me.
i was a wolf for a while, and then when the wolf began to draw back, i showered because i had human obligations. the wolf receded, but never disappeared. for three days it stayed just under my skin, and despite the crash that followed, i feel like that was Something.
some kind of stepping stone. because ive been noticing how much i still try to squish the wolf feelings down, how much i ignore my body, and how much worse i inevitably feel when i squash it vs when i allow myself to feel my own body.
i wanna work on that. i wanna chase myself into a future where i feel what i need to, and meet my own desires.
i engage with kink from a place of species first and foremost. there is a difference, for me, between puppy play, and what i am. i referenced this in a previous blog post, but the idea of wearing ears and tails and pup gear comes, for me, from a place of kink and play, whereas my wider experience of caninity is less tied to kink (although kink is also an embodied process for me), and more tied to a visceral and complicated tangible, somatic experience.
if i put on a collar/a leash/a hood, that action leans more towards play than species euphoria. among many other things, i like playing with degradation, humiliation, condescension. i find being ‘diminished’ from wolf to human pup a satisfying manifestation of those things. while the trappings of kink can make my silhouette feel right, can paint an outline-of-almost over me, in a way that does feel comforting, and is very fun, my engagement with puphood, with wolfhood, with dogness, does not end there.
i am also a werewolf. at pup/furry/kink events, i love the community feeling, but i do not want to be touched by or touch strangers. i do not want to be called a ‘good dog’ by anyone i do not know, nor do i want to be called a ‘good puppy’ by anyone other than my owner, ever. i wouldn’t say i engage with kink particularly quietly/privately, but i am not someone who goes in for enthusiastic (or otherwise) consent with strangers. i am not a friendly dog. i am a hybrid, a monster, something human-made and ill-equipped to be handled by anyone who is not extremely qualified and well-versed in what it takes to care for something like me. i am a half-wild animal with a handler. i am kept as a pet because i enjoy the degradation, and because i enjoy the trust and affection, and because i enjoy the knowledge that i choose this.
i did not choose lycanthropy. but if i could, i would choose it every time. i would choose to make it more visceral, more real, more painful every time. i enjoy pain. i allow my owner to do harm to me, because we both enjoy it, and because it cements a dynamic between us that is the most fulfilling thing in my life. i like being punished for my natural behaviours, tamed, put in my place, domesticated. i like knowing that i can trust someone enough to hurt me. i like knowing that someone respects me enough to hurt me.
i like knowing that, both inside and outside of scenes, that same person encourages me to bark, to howl, to engage with dogness. i like eating from a dog bowl, being shooed from furniture. i like running in the woods. i am wild, and i am not. i am two things. i am gendered and ungendered. i am worthy of love and worthy of pain. i am dog and wolf. i am monster and human. i play at dogness, and i am a dog.
i like knowing what i am, and i like playing around in that knowledge, and in that self, in a way that allows me to expand and transform all the time. don't let me bite you, no matter how hard i beg. bind me and bite me yourself instead.
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.
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.
I spend all night agonising over how to approach them, what to say, how much to reveal about the shape of my own soul. My human friend says, I'm workshopping ways to say 'my friend is a wolf and they like your ears.' They remain patient with me while I hover and hair out three, four, five times over the course of the evening. I feel sharp and hot and animal. When we leave, my friend says, we should go that way, you'll regret not saying something. The be-tailed girls are standing on the other side of the road, saying their goodbyes. I screw up my courage, because my friend is right, and go over. I love your ears, I tell them.
One turns away from me. The other speaks. She says, thanks, I love your collar. My collar is bright yellow. It reads I BITE. She says, I want a pin or something, but I don't know how it would fit with my outfit. We are both clearly nervous. I am disappointed. I make my excuses quickly, lead my friend up the hill toward home. They look quizzically at me, but say nothing about my clumsy departure. I feel guilty. I am powerless to explain my disappointment to them - these girls did nothing wrong. I just hoped for, I realise as we walk home, something different.
It was, despite their innocent intentions, a moment of recognition for me; a lightning bolt of understanding. Yes, I am not like them. I am something else, something sharp. I have a vision of myself I cannot control. I am not play-acting. I am a being in constant flux, who dreams of a different body, of chasing trucks and hunting rabbits and the separation of head from body. I feel my bones and organs rearrange. I feel my thoughts slide like stretched rubber between two sets of ears.
I knew something was wrong with the girlhood assigned me at birth, that I was different in some nebulous way I had no words for and feared terribly, from a very early age. I channelled that feeling into something formless and always just parallel to feeling right enough to fit me, until I found the words to navigate my idea of gender and its fluidity, its vast, deep waters, and its relation to myself. But I knew something was wrong with the humanity assigned me at birth, that I was different in a very specific way, long before I began to think about gender. I had very specific feelings and no entirely accurate words for them, or for my animal differences, but I knew I was a dog. I didn't know I could be something approximating humandog, and I feared terribly the notion of being 'found out' and punished, isolated, or worse: being made entirely human.
It was around the same time that I began to realise I was perceived as entirely human, that I realised I was also being perceived, despite my best efforts, as entirely girl. And more than that, that I was being made entirely girl. I was terrified. There was a terrible snowballing of lost agency, of forced shifting of personality into something uncomfortable and unfitting. And then there were two moments, horrible bright spots on the timeline of this muggy darkness, where I realised what was happening, and, worse, that it would not stop. There would be no return to a genderless age, as I had hoped, and as I had kept anticipating.
There was a winding timeline of refusing my body: trying to hide and ignore my period, refusal to take care of myself, a terror of bras and skirts. I was a feral, unclean thing, afraid and gnawing off my paws. There were many moments, after the realisation that I would not be allowed to go back, no matter how much I tugged at the leash, where I tried make-up and long hair and skirts. Where I tried boys and self-sacrifice. There was a shedding of tomboyism, a turn towards choice feminism and hidden lesbianism. There was a brutal and calculated separation of human and dog. All these things were tied up in the suppression of my wolf, which never truly went away, but was made small and scared as I was.
It would be years before I accepted I did not have a place within binary gender, and that stepping out of it would make me deliriously happy. It would be longer still before the wolf could come creeping back into my chest to curl up behind my heart, and I could accept that human:animal binaries do not serve me either. Gender and caninity are bound closely for me, and while I appreciate and love puppygirlism for what it is, and while there are some shared qualities between my caninity and that of puppygirls, it will never align exactly with my experience of animality.
I cannot play at wolfhood. I will never be a puppy. I cannot consider outfit implications or costuming. Just as I cannot be a woman. I will never be a girl, and I never was. All I did was consider outfit implications and costuming, and I refuse that future for myself. I am something sharp-toothed and strange, and while that is a lonely and winding way forward, it is forward.
I haven’t been to a spin class in a little over a week. The last year of my life has, in large part, been about building habits. It was difficult to build up to five classes a week, but I had just reached that goal, which lasted for all of two weeks without break. To have such a new routine that cost so much energy and anxiety disturbed so quickly made me feel like a failure.
I like spinning. I like the routine, the structure, the way my joints can handle it. But for a week and half, I couldn’t go. Returning today, I felt my tail between my legs. I was anxious, and my body hurt. I felt very human. But it felt good to get on the bike and go fast. It feels good to have finally found a way to move my body that works for both my brain and my body, both the human and the canine. When I get my speed up, I feel like a sighthound, flying over open ground. When I increase my resistance, I feel like a wolf, hunting up a mountain, walking for days. Today, when I wanted to stop around three-quarters of the way into class and go home, I decided to lean into the feeling.
I was flagging; I felt guilty; I was nauseous and my head was pounding, a headache building in earnest in the top of my spine. I told myself: there is a hare before you, and it worked. I kept my speed fairly consistent; I wasn’t slowing as much or as quickly. It distracted me from the difficulties of having a body; the pain, and the nausea, and the anxiety. My eyes were unfocussed; I was picturing a hare, skirting away from me into the rocks.
I was picturing myself, leaping after it, flying over rough ground. The hare veers away; I give chase. It almost gets away; I must keep my speed and give determined chase. I told myself: if you catch it, there will be blood. You will be able to tear it to pieces. This, too, worked. I was running, my motivation iron smell and soft fur and something held between my teeth. I felt better; I felt faster; I felt stronger. I was able to hold my body in check and control my fear, the part of my brain flashing poison warnings and squealing at me to tap out and run home to safety. My discomfort was tempered by my desire to catch, to feel myself in my body despite the cost.
I held out, and finished the class. I slipped out and started home without ado. I felt my teeth; sharp and itching. My gums ached, and my mouth fell open. A small victory, and one that felt profound to me. It reminds me of a post I saw once about how (paraphrasing), if the thing that gets you to brush your teeth is your belief that Naruto would be proud of you for brushing your teeth, you’re still brushing your teeth. I need to move my body more. I want to move my body more. The imagined hunt helped me stick to something scary and difficult for me as I learn to rebuild my life. It helped me navigate my anxiety, something that has the capacity to be disabling for me. It helped me stay in body, and not try to squirm out of it as I often do.
I snapped my teeth at a gull on my way home.
i. the reactions of my body to the change in my form
ii. the reactions of the environment around me to the change in my form
When I walk down the street and I feel my fur; feel the wrong eyes looking out from my face; feel my ears and teeth; feel my spine match my gait as I step into its muscularity and certainty; people react. I tell myself, they move by you as though a wolf were in their midst, and that thought amuses me. I ask myself; do they see you, truly, and consciously, or are they unsettled by something more difficult to pinpoint, or by your queerness, your alternative trappings, your neurodivergence. Then I ask: does it matter? The reaction is the reaction: I feel what I feel. Does the why matter at all?
How it feels is what matters most to me. When I step into the wolf, it is a process. It is not an easy process. My teeth are almost always where I feel it first: the throbbing, pulsing, itch along my gums. At the points where my gums meet my teeth, I feel tension; a pushing of balled up wanting, waiting. It releases itself along the stretch of my mouth, and my teeth are reformed, shaped into sharp cones, into ragged peaks of bone. With the sharpening of the teeth comes the elongation of the muzzle. I feel a fizzing sensation, a sort of tingling like electricity, around my nose, my mouth, my cheeks. The philtrum feels like it might split. My jaw aches. I have to grind my teeth, wiggle the hinge of my mandible and maxilla. I yawn a lot; my bones pop. There comes a tightness in the bones of my neck. The atlas begins to pulse so hard it’s like breathing.
Around C3 I feel a pressure, a vertebral mutiny. The skin around that column of cartilage fighting bone grows tight, painful. It ripples with phantom fur. I feel little rough quills sitting like a heavy blanket from the top of my head, now crowned with a sagittal crest I feel pulling the rest of my skull after it, all the way down to my tail bone. It is particularly thick at my neck and over my shoulders. I know it is black, grey-black in places, and coarse. I know my eyes are yellow-orange, a deep animal colour, like amber. When I blink, I feel my tapetum lucedum grow membranous and blue behind my sight and I know that if you shone a light over my new face my eyes would shine back.
My shoulders ache to stretch out; my joints become fluid. I pace to feel them move beneath me, my gait a high-stepping trot on the balls of my feet, my toes splayed. I rolled my neck. My body is heavy with its wrongness. It is sealed too closely around a second shape, which kicks at me from within. I breathe heavy, slack-mawed, pupils blown. In the mirror, I see wildness in my face. I get down on all fours, lay on my side. Like this, I feel the soles of my feet catch flame. They are paws, now, my legs angled and furred and canine. My arms I stretch before me, and rest atop, feeling the flatness of my chin against the solidity of their length. My tail bone is a thin twig sweeping sickle-marks into the ground and feathered with hair.
My body is still here, but chalked over it in a way that feels like something resting over me, and simultaneously like something pushing out from inside me, is my other body. There is discomfort; there is pain. There is often a thrashing and somewhat desperate element to my pacing, to my fall to the ground or to the mattress. I try to make myself comfortable. I lie still and focus on my breathing. My mind is a still water of instinct. All I think is it feels like this and what next? I wait for the drive. I am still there inside my head. But the other mind that comes with the other body wants to eat fish; it wants to chase hare; it wants to watch the water. It wants to rest, and to fuck, and to tear. It wants to run over hard ground and to swim against current.
It is difficult to induce the change. I do not call it, but it happens to me. I am learning how to call it, but that has, up to this point, looked less like control and more like understanding the things that tend to trigger it. Getting out of my own way and allowing the change to happen has been my biggest lesson in that regard. If I step aside, allow all the doors in me to open and myself to come flooding out, I can feel it and know it is real. I find myself wound tight and snappish a few days before the moon is full. I am irritable, and driven more by loud and distinct needs, and I seek solitude from humans.
Generally, I forget the moon is coming, and wonder at my inability to be human. Until the night it rises, and my body changes. In the lead-up to the big change, I might feel little parts reshape themselves; just my teeth, for example, or my ears, rotating and flickering, or my neck hair, shaggy and raised. These feelings, albeit often not as strong as I experience them at moontime, come to me also when I am overwhelmed. This overwhelm happens most often in busy, loud, and public spaces.
I find my teeth growing out at work; I find my loping gait transporting me across campus during exam season; I feel my hackles raise on a loud and busy bus journey. I have to work hard to keep the change localised, limited. I have to work hard to retain language, and to follow more complex scenarios and thoughts to their socially-accepted ‘logical’ conclusion. Logic, for me, changes. Reason changes. My perspective and priorities change. I want to whine and growl before I want to vocalise human language.
I flinch at the sound of passing cars; I find the high ceilings and harsh angles of human architecture unbearable. I am drawn to dappled shade, to water, to open air or dark, cool burrow. I find I am more easily confused. I feel my sense of smell and hearing are heightened. I am still me; I am still able to perceive the colour green, for which I will be eternally grateful. I am still able, despite the increased difficulty, to parse human speech. The ways in which I would normally react to stimuli (tipping my head to listen, a caution in all my watchful movements, scratching at myself with flat claws, a hatred of sudden, loud sounds, among others) are amplified. I make quicker decisions.
When I change, I know people can see it.
I know this because they tell me. Sometimes, they tell me in clear and particular ways. My partner, telling me they can see my ears. Friends telling me my tail wagging is as obvious as the sun. Other times, it is more abstract. My mother, when we argued while I was a teenage werewolf, would tell me to stop doing that with my eyes. I didn't need to ask why she flinched away. I knew what she was seeing. Just as I know what people in the street, when they give me a wary berth as I trot by, hungry and tired and feeling the fur between my shoulders, see. Because I feel it. And I see it, too.
we want art from, for, and about the non-human. we want to know how it feels when you transform; what you do with your transformation; how you upkeep your mechanical components. we want the pain, the want, the change, the aftermath. we want TRANSFORMATION.
this blog exists as a living collection of transformations. we want you to send us what happens when you transform; the feeling, the knowledge, the aftermath, what it means to you. BONEBREAK is a space for non-human art about non-human experience; it is a catalogue, specifically, of transformations and their feeling, their phenomenology.
BONEBREAK is a place to ask: what do you want to feel? how are you meant to be beheld? whowhat are you?
if you want to share your transformation with us, reach out to unhumanised@gmail.com and let's talk! i'm always seeking to interview people and non-persons alike about their inhuman experience.
