The Lack of Genuine Sanctuary (for "actual Otherkin") in the Modern Era

Tehom wrote:Currently, the only real way to "make anything happen" is to put yourself "out there and get talking to people" in a very personal way, making strategic choices as to the who, where, when of it all. And should you not arrive where intended, all you've then accomplished is telling, perhaps showing, a bunch of strangers deeply personal things about yourself...

Tehom wrote:I would agree with you. I would be interested in hearing more of your journey, insofar you are comfortable sharing. Also Extended to Glasswalker. But to a more related thought -- What would your advice be toward those attempting to do as you had, in our current time?  As You and Others say, the "Community" is not at all what it once was in the way of being able to provide these opportunities, these friendships. I am sure there are many More without the benefit of answers gained through experience with their Own ...  What would You do Now if you had never met those aforementioned people?

When confronted with the oceanic problems with essentializing a concept of “the human” as an ontologically distinct object from nature and the nonhuman, the tendency historically has been to resort to passive erasure of all that problematizes the definition. Indistinction between human and nonhuman creates anxiety for a culture that is reflexively seeking to justify what is only a relative cultural perspective and ideology as “the vital and eternal truths about humanity,” and historically this recurrent indistinction that haunts these rigid distinctions has either been passively erased (excluded form discourse) or violently suppressed.[22] [23] The machinations of anthropocentrism share a common thread across time: the (human) history as largely devoted to a desperate pursuit of fabricating “the human” as wholly distinct from “the nonhuman” by the erasure of “the nonhuman” which is itself only one particular lens of “the history of modern civilization” not shared by many indigenous peoples. And what is ignored in all of this is the more-than-human history of thought and being, which extends across the life ages of the Earth.

But at the heart of it, divergent persons are presented with another deeper problem: how do we communicate highly divergent experiences, thoughts, worldviews and lifeways with “normal” individuals who have no analog within their own experiences by which to draw an understanding? What if our very experiences of reality themselves do not conform to many of the ontological assumptions of what reality constitutes according to the normative viewpoint of what reality is?

This poses a problem for nonhuman-identifying humans as well—our experiences are of a highly divergent nature—how can other humans who have never literally experienced their bodies and selves as other animals possibly relate to how that alters our concepts of ourselves and our being in the world? For the average person, the thought is, “how could you possibly be nonhuman? I am looking at your body right now! It is human?” What is not understood in this case is that we are experiencing our bodies, our selves, our being as nonhuman in modes that only we can perceive because we are being that: it is a subjective lived experience. The onlooker, without any way of relating to or experiencing our inner worlds, concludes that because we look the same, we must think and experience the same.

This constitutes the passive erasure of nonhuman beings; it is a passive form of anthropocentrism. We can call it: normalized cognitive bias. It is, essentially, an overgeneralization of oneself to the world of experiences, a truly difficult problem to overcome. It is anthropocentric in that it usually manifests in an individual who overgeneralizes their own “experiences of being” and “belief that these experiences are human” to the world, to all other “humans,” even if those “humans” have nonhuman experiences, beings and identities. It is, in many ways, innocent, and there are practical ways to move past that: through sharing our experiences with each other, especially our differences and bridging understandings through this, through presentation of divergent thoughts and perspectives by adapting theses as best as we can to forms of communication which have historically been unconducive to them (due to how the presuppositions that “we are all essentially human in the same way” have influenced the development of language and communication), also through refusal to conform to reductions of our experiences to an essentially human framework, which erases significant alterity and differences of being. Bridging this gap requires the maintenance of a tension between our actual radical divergence and attempts at conveying that divergence through relatable modes of similarity. It is the self-same problem that is at the heart of how much of “humanity” misunderstands the nonhuman/animal. We have to be Open and receptive to significant difference and real alterity without always already assuming we can even understand it let alone notice it.