13 years

Content warning: brief mentions of domestic abuse

At the beginning of 2026, I was thinking about my otherkin past, and the roads not taken. Of reading things I had created in the community the last time I was around (under a different name), and wondering to myself what I would say to people about my current journey.

In 2013, I came to the realisation that I somehow felt like an elf. I felt so bizarre and alone in that feeling and even though I found some comfort in the writings of others, I was really at unease with myself. After a few years and some pretty unpleasant interactions with various otherkin community members, I decided that enough was enough. This felt embarrassing, I hated myself, I had been around too many emotionally immature or unwell people and I needed to go.

For many more years, I continued to be a stranger to myself, but I still felt that inner sense of otherworldliness burning in the back of my mind, occasionally resurfacing in sharp, painful tones early in the morning or gliding alongside me on a quiet walk, and whenever it became obvious enough, I’d go:

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”

The nonhuman concept was something I’d wear as a costume online still; I couldn’t repress myself that much. But that innate sense of actually being, that was repressed. I was a non-person. I gave up on life dreams of creativity because I was scared I might express myself too much; if someone were to ask me basic friendly questions like activities I like to do, I’d freeze and give them nothing.

Many years stretched out since my departure from the otherkin community - I learned that I had been the victim of domestic abuse since childhood and entered a painful and long recovery process in a new city.

As I began to recognise what it would require to rebuild my life, the elf within me became a source of fixation and fear; I felt fundamentally broken, cringey, unacceptable. I felt cursed, that I was somehow imprinted with this concept and unable to get it out of me. It was so hard to make progress because this thing made me feel so fundamentally broken that it radiated into anything I touched.

Feelings emerged a couple of years within my recovery process, but nothing like I had experienced them before. They were encompassing, they were bodily. In these moments my voice shifted a little, my posture changed, memories recontextualised but didn’t change. The symptoms had echoes of but didn’t align with DID, and my counsellor didn’t seem worried. With enough time it seemed like I had been living with dissociation my whole life, and this is what I’m like when I’m not dissociating.

The less I dissociated, the more I identified with being nonhuman. This made the process of getting over my trauma more complicated and much more scary - surely this should be the opposite, surely the nonhuman thing is the sign of illness!

Right now this is still where I am. I’m still often pretty dissociated. I have more tools and understanding to let my guard down around letting myself be, but I’m not quite over it yet.

For some people - there’s awakening, and then simply living your life. But for me that was absolutely not the case. I kept finding this thing in me and I couldn’t stand myself. I lived a life that might as well have been an attempt at a metaphorical suicide - don’t let people know, empty myself out, keep myself busy, run down the clock. It’s a time I look upon now with existential horror.

Looking back at otherkin writings that I read 13 years ago, some still feel salient or interesting to me, but there are a lot of words from otherkin that feel disembodied to me, that don’t really touch a life. Especially one that might be damaged, or one that doesn’t find supernatural claims convincing.

I want to consolidate what I’ve learned and what is helping me work my way out of this mess, in the hopes it will keep me honest and prevent past mistakes. Turning it into this public-facing website project helps to provide a shape and motivation, and maybe it will mean something to someone else and fill the void that I felt starting out.

I also want to continue the tradition of the personal website that has existed in this community for decades. The elf and otherkin websites from the turn of the millennium are cherished artefacts for me, beautiful and focused spaces to delve into one’s inner world. This format is the most robust and least susceptible to link rot too. To further protect the longevity of this website in case it is useful to someone else, I’ve made my writings public domain.