i'm otherhearted about it, but don't get it twisted. i am a horse! how can that be?

it's been a bit of a journey. it actually started out as a joke! in a dark age past, when i didn't have a fursona, my darling wife and cohost assigned me some animal or another. i don't remember what it was except that i didn't vibe with it. i also don't remember what possessed me to hit back with horse. but it made him big mad (in a jokey way). he's my favourite person in the world, but he's also my favourite person in the world to piss off, so i just kept doubling down on it.

over time, it ended up getting comfy. this was back when our system had just come out of a period of dormancy, and suddenly i was an adult and i had space to be an actual person rather than a survival mechanism. but i found that, because of that, i didn't have much of a self-concept. since horse had kind of become "my thing", i kept going back to it as a reference point. what are horses like? am i like that?

yes! as it turns out, yes. i'm nervous, sensitive, and a little bit cliquish. i like to think i'm quite prudent, and a decently hard worker. i value stability and try to avoid conflict - because i can get pretty reactive if i'm pushed! and perhaps most importantly: i define myself by my group, my system, and find security in knowing what my role is in it. if we were to analogize horse behaviour to human personality traits, it'd be pretty darn close.

and that's basically what daemonism is, isn't it? it's something we've collectively toyed with on and off, both the projecting part and the formfinding part. mostly analytic, because we've known about it at least long enough that we remember when symbolic forms didn't exist. i personally didn't get super deep into it initially - until one day i found myself ten pages deep into a thread on the daemon forum... researching for otherkin wiki the origin of the term "otherhearted".

y'all, i really need to stress this: the spirit of the word otherhearted is so deeply tied to the experiences of the daemians that shaped it. there's been a lot of discourse about how it's supposed to be defined in relation to otherkinity and therianthropy. and yes, it's true that most people described their animal-experience as identifying with, not as a species. it's equally true that some daemians had identical experiences to therians, and simply didn't vibe with the label. but both these points are moot, because neither were the nucleus of the experience. what was the thing that united these two types of people?

passion. pure passion. especially circa 2011, when the word was coined, daemians were expected to be extremely rigorous in finding their settled form. the self-analysis, laying your soul bare in front of your community to be judged. the form-finding, learning the contours of this animal so intimately that its skin leaves an imprint on yours. the projection, reaffirming this species' presence in your life, day after day, the shadow that you cast when you walk. the first otherhearted people were otherhearted because they were daemians, plain and simple.

and this is basically what i'd been doing the whole time on my own! for years, i'd been spending conscious time with Horse, sizing myself up in relation to it, deliberately looking for the parellels. i had, genuinely, never wanted to use a label for my experiences before this point. i didn't see the point in them! what changed my mind wasn't finding the right definition, it was finding the right culture. it was finding the right attitude.

my feelings have only grown over time. in fact, they became so intense, i briefly questioned a therian identity, but no. i am a horse, but i'm not a horse in the way that horse therians are. it can be quite difficult to articulate just how there's a difference, and that's put me off writing about it for a long time even though i've so dearly wanted to. but i think i have enough material now (after what, five years?) to try.

i consider therianthropy and otherkinity "from the inside out" experiences. you've got a deeply seeded nonhuman essence that grows up to the surface. conversely, i felt like i became a horse from the outside in. that's a little abstract, so let me give you an example: shifts! therians and kin have described shifting to me as an upwelling of instinct that can either be suppressed or allowed to break free. but a shift, for me, is a pulling towards Horse. i'm either being drawn to it, or deliberately drawing it to myself in order to enter more deeply into an experience of horseness.

similarly, building up my self-image as a horse has been a layered and intentional process. i think it would be hard to see myself as anything other than a draft horse, but that's not a truth in and of itself. it flows from the fact that i'm physically large, and i have a mild and down-to-earth demeanour. all of the things that are true about me as a horse are so because they're true about me as a person first. i guess you could say that my heartedness is a conversation between myself and the big ol species archetype that is Horse. it forms in the space between us.

a person could still call themself a therian based on the same experiences i have if only they believed different things about what they meant and what caused them. and, as i mentioned earlier, people who have identical experiences to therians have instead called themselves otherhearted for various reasons. some people would identify as linkers or archetropers or furries with experiences like these. but it was in the writing of the early daemian-otherhearted communities that i first saw myself. i feel connected to those people specifically, and what they believe about their animal identities, and what they do about it.

it's not at all that i think conventional descriptions are wrong. i don't disagree with the "family" and "adoption" metaphors people have used to articulate heartedness in the past, because i feel that way too. love for my hearttype remains at the core of the otherhearted experience for me. just know that if you leave yourself open to it, hold it close, and keep holding, and keep holding... that love can get so deep inside you that it stops being something you have and starts being something you are.