My early childhood isn’t of much importance, being much the same as many therians. I always loved animals; I always loved pretending I was an animal… ho hum, et cetera. I don’t personally consider that therianthropy; I consider it being a creative, animal-loving little girl. However, as I grew there would be… moments when I would ‘get into’ it more than my friends. In a way I think that that’s probably related to my therianthropy – it makes sense that if you ‘shift’ when you’re already pretending to be a wolf, then it would feel different, and so it did. I was young, though, and I can’t remember that far back all that clearly (I sound about ninety years old!).

The first time I actually remember anything directly connected to therianthropy was when I was in Grade Six, or so. By that time I hadn’t played being an animal for two years, or so, and instead of loving all animals equally I was fixated on horses. However, one day I decided to go for a run in the forest near my house… it must have been mid-autumn, because I can remember the smell of the leaves very clearly. I ran, and I ran, and I ran. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking and just let myself run, panting and tossing my head and occasionally growling because it felt good in my chest and that was the only thing that was important. Eventually I got so tired that occasional stops to walk weren’t enough, so I paused next to the ledge of a crevice that’s in the forest. And I howled. And it felt good, so I howled again, and then I ran some more.

It wasn’t until I got home, dirty and exhausted but elated, that I paused to actually consider what had happened. I didn’t exactly *like* wolves all that much, compared to other animals – I thought of them as big dogs with nice eyes. I didn’t think too hard about it all, except to recognize that it had happened before, and it would happen again, and I didn’t know what it was but it felt right. I was in sixth grade. I went on to the next thing.

And so it did happen again – probably more than I can remember, as even now when I’m aware of it I can’t always notice the point where suddenly I ought to have a muzzle and tail, it’s such a natural and integral part of myself. I am a contherianthrope for the most part, after all. I can only recall one more ‘big’ moment like that, and a handful of brief moments. This was until mid-grade eight, where I stumbled onto therianthropy. Unfortunately, I stumbled onto it at Werewolf.com. Everybody groan with me, now!

Luckily, I managed to separate what was true from what wasn’t, at least enough to feel the calm, startling spark of recognition. Eventually I got tired of Werewolf.com – wait a second, this isn’t what happens to me – and went in search of other sites. I found a few, Shifters.org being one of them. I started going for more runs, searching out the feeling again the only way I knew how, trying to find it again so I could know for sure that that’s what I was feeling. Around the same time, I stumbled onto Paganism and with that, meditation. My forays into religion, meditation was the key to showing me how to calm myself down and think rationally even without actual meditation, which of course helped as well. I started doing what’s casually referred to as ‘soul searching’.

Somewhere along the way I reached the point where it felt comfortable to say that yes, there is something not entirely human inside of me, and that non-human something is Wolf. I went through various periods of questioning and skepticism, as well as periods when I just didn’t care all that much about therianthropy even when I still ‘believed’ it. Despite this, there has only been one incidence of any importance to anybody other than me since then.

I’m a polywere, and to be quite honest, I have a lot of problems with that. From the point where I became 'awere' I noticed my shifts when they occurred, and try as I did to make them that way, not all of them were Wolf. This irritated me to no end. First of all, I find it hard to reconcile myself rationally to the idea of having not only one but two animals ‘inside’ me; secondly, it’s difficult to understand how I can be a contherianthrope when I’m not just Wolf and Human. Thirdly, my time at werewolf.com taught me to equate polywere with the same boy who claims that he wakes up covered in blood. However, I’ve managed to reconcile myself with the idea – the problem is discovering what species that mysterious ‘other’ is. For a long time I said ‘horse’ because I can bring on an intense, complicated phantom and sometimes mental shift for horse without any real difficulty. However, in the past few months I’ve noticed that I don’t ‘shift horse’ unless I do so consciously. Also, when I shift ‘other’ it doesn’t feel like it does when I shift horse. I’ve come to believe that when I do shift horse it’s simply a cameo shift, and the vividness of it comes from my love for horses and the amount of time I spend around them.

I’ll see what comes.