G.D.
- Otherkin -
Extraterrestrial or
Metaphysical
Vampiric Black Shuck
Posts: 2,243
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Post by G.D. on Mar 1, 2018 17:42:10 GMT
I've been poking some independent communities lately and noticing that there isn't much discussion going on there. Although there's not a 'lot' to really discuss, the use of the Otherkin/Therian community as a social hub promotes a tad bit of stagnation in return. As well, the number of individuals entering the community and not being asked to ponder the 'why' of things grows larger as time goes on. On websites such as Facebook, Reddit, and so forth the older members of the community still inquire upon the reasoning behind a person's choice of label, which is excellent. However there seems to be a stigma against pursuing that thought thread past a particular point in the conversation. Along with a few other weird stigmas that I'll never understand. This means that the hard questions are not getting asked, and people's mettle is not being tested. Not to say that we constantly need to harass each other on the notion of the non-human identity. But rather we need to promote the idea that critical thought and doubt aren't necessarily bad things. People on this forum know that TW has a reputation for being a source of hard questions, so our understanding on the topic will be mutual, most of the time. But is it helping the rest of the community to back off when we see an opportunity for thorough discourse?
People say they get discouraged by such questions. I would wager this being due to our 'everyone's a winner' mentality in our modern lives. That not having the answers is somehow failure for most people, and they've rarely experienced such before. Obviously this idea of doubt being a terrible monster can be corrected with time and kind wording, but many don't stick around long enough to see that through. They flake off and fade into obscurity, or find another community that won't ask too many questions. Or, on occasion, blame the individual who made them doubt instead of working through that doubt.
I've spent time thinking lately and I have a few things to ask. It's everyone's job, in a way, to welcome new members to the community in a way that will make them feel safe but also put them in a place for thorough introspection. When you joined the community, what did you like and dislike about it your first contact? What questions made you think and which ones seemed out of place? What piece of advice has helped you the most during your journey? Did you discover something about yourself that you never would have due to being asked such things? And what is one instance of discussion that has changed the way you look at your identity?
The goal behind this, to some extent, is to figure out what helps people the most when they come looking for answers. Though as we know, most of the time a person will and should leave with more questions than answers at the very beginning. But I'm curious as to how everyone's journey has been so far. And how we can use such information to potentially aid people who are just starting theirs.
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Nøkken
- Therian -
Standard Animal
Horse
One more night of walking/and I could have become/A horse, a blue horse, dancing/Down a road, alone
Posts: 187 
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Post by Nøkken on Mar 3, 2018 21:37:29 GMT
I've been poking some independent communities lately and noticing that there isn't much discussion going on there. Although there's not a 'lot' to really discuss, the use of the Otherkin/Therian community as a social hub promotes a tad bit of stagnation in return. As well, the number of individuals entering the community and not being asked to ponder the 'why' of things grows larger as time goes on. Part of it, I think, is actually the shift in social media in the Internet affecting online communities. Ever since the early 2000s social media has created a problem for independent websites because platforms like Facebook stress integration of online identities. I've noticed that there's a lot of active discussion on Facebook groups, and I think this is partially due to the platform itself. Older members seem to be interested in older iterations of the internet, which involve private forums and webpages. The younger generation is born onto platforms like Facebook. Perhaps, a way we can address this is by adapting and integrating with social media more? Addressing your specific point, I think it is because of the focus of inquiry in the community. Typically when people ask questions they are asking individual members to be critical of themselves. Given the amount of children in the community, this creates problems because children, overall, are just developing their sense of selves. As a result, while some of them can be very open to being amorphous, most children make bold and fixed identity claims which shift around from month to month. It's part of developmental psychology, and one of the responses to how frightening it is to be "transforming into an entirely different person with one's growing brain" is to continuously reaffirm fixity, even if one's opinions and beliefs shift continuously. Indeed! What can possibly smooth this over more is if there were designated methods for people to seek criticism, or some kind of formalized channel for it. At the same time it is very important to always be questioning, when I look at it from the perspective of some who is young, probably a social outcast, and just discovering the community, if there is no warning for what part of their identity might be questioned, then it creates an continuous atmosphere of paranoia, leading to the individual shutting themselves out to any kind of criticism at all. Perhaps, what we can do better is to always preempt criticisms by letting such individuals know that it is not meant as antagonism and/or by encouraging others to ask for criticism by promoting an atmosphere of learning instead of representing it as skepticism. Ultimately it's all the same thing, but I think it matters a lot how something is presented when someone who doesn't know how to interpret something is more readily going to interpret it as antagonistic probably because of their personal circumstances and fear of being rejected for their already present deviance of questioning whether they are Otherkin. This is a constant source of frustration for me. Criticism ought to be welcomed because if it is astute, then you learn something you didn't know, and if it isn't effective, then you learn a better way of responding to such criticism. I, personally, blame the coddling of our public schools. Many of my students experience failure for the first time in their private violin studios when they fail to prepare correctly for concerts or auditions. For those students, the schools guarantee that failure is never perceived as failure. Performing creates a real sense of failure because if they walk in front of a lot of people, they have to learn to respond to displaying themselves and their imperfections for a large crowd. In public schools, the bar for success is lowered so that anyone can pass it, and therefore they never learn how to adequately cope with, address, and overcome failures, which is probably the most vital part of education. It's a little fuzzy because of how long ago it was. But what I remember is that I was kind of a self-righteous little **** who went around making bold claims about topics I didn't know about. Some people were very understanding and presented criticism of me with the intent for me to grow and learn. There was always another group that presented criticism more with the intent to hurt something they found to be a nuisance. I love that the close friends I developed in the community were much older than me and were always willing to question everything I said with warmth and no malintent. What I really didn't like in the early days was that there were always a group of people that wanted to transform the community into their own image of it, imagining that the community was going to become a new religion or imagining that it was going to be a major countercultural social movement. Those people always set out with the intent of portraying the community exactly as they imagined it and would very violently respond to anyone that questioned their vision of it. It was ultimately very harmful for the community and placed the interests of said individual above the well-being of everyone else. Hmm. The questions that made me think were the ones that presented new ways of understanding and seeing the phenomena. The questions that tended to feel more like personal attacks where when individuals worked really hard to uncover contradictions in my thought. The latter felt appropriate only if it was by close friends who knew me well and for whom we recognized there was no intent to harm. Overall, with unfamiliarity, I found presentation of ideas rather than determination of ideas to be effective for my younger self. When others told me what to think, that is when I generally responded poorly. I don't believe there was a single piece of advice that really helped in particular, but actually the best things that were offered to me for personal growth came from someone who was not Otherkin. It was when I was on SecondLife. I met a lot of interesting people and the Otherkin community on SecondLife interacted much more with other subcultures there because SL already created an atmosphere of acceptance of people's weirdness. As a result I actually met someone who was a part of the BDSM community on SL named Geoff who worked as a political analyst for many different campaigns and had his JD in law. I'd only met him because the Otherkin community was much more open and less fearful of outside interaction, and I often presented questions and got into philosophical debates about nonhuman animals with him. He introduced me to the philosopher Michel Foucault's writings, in particular what became my favorite work of literature "The History of Madness". What he did the most for me is break my conditioned preconceptions about cognitive difference---that there are many different ways of being in the world and that what is "normal" is just an arbitrary statistical point. This ultimately led me to seek out deviance as the center of my intellectual interests in the Otherkin community and beyond. Absolutely. If I had not been questioned by other individuals, I would have never taken an interest in philosophy in the first place. The very fact that people always asked me questions led me toward an interest in the very field that concerns itself with questioning. In many ways, my experience of skepticism in the community is precisely what made me who I am today. |
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Utopian
- Therian -
Standard Animal
Deer
Posts: 370
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Post by Utopian on Mar 10, 2018 19:11:11 GMT
What I disliked about the community when I joined was that higher importance was placed on appearances rather than truth. It's still like that in every corner of the community I've visited, including TW. People are shallow. My identity as a deer shaped people's behavior towards me, a few specific times for sure and I suspect more than that. There was a lot of drama over trivial things as well.
Anyways, what most negatively affected me had to do with that dishonesty and people's weird obsession with social hierarchy. Things that didn't matter to me. "Real life" stress weighed on me as well, and at some point, I figured I should learn to accept the chaos and deception since that's how people were, and I was only increasing my suffering by fighting it. But then accepting a truth that wasn't mine left me extremely confused.
Something I liked was the old posts and serious blogs outside of the forums that people made, specifically from older members. I was curious about them and this way, I didn't have to get into a mess of interacting with them directly. Interaction was where I seemed to go wrong. Anyways, it was interesting and also gave me a sense of relief and freedom. Not as in, "I can be whatever I want because it's accepted here". I really hated the idea of acceptance because that's what I believed motivated people to pretend. It was more like, "I can investigate this aspect of myself and take it seriously instead of suppress it".
Seeing people speak up and actually not agree with the rest of a certain corner of the community was good too. Something I currently don't like about the community is that sometimes it seems like people's own words have been made obsolete. Like the words and conclusions of the community replace the words of the individual. It's weird. It takes away ownership in a way as well as responsibility.
As far as questions or advice, I've missed out on that. I haven't actively avoided it but I also haven't put myself out there too much and so I don't think people have gotten to know me well enough to ask relevant or deep questions. I find answers in psychology, mundane things that randomly help me connect dots and by writing. Life experience and boundaries play a role in my understanding of myself.
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