Draconity [07/2022]

[1537 words/6min read]

My identity as a dragon is a chimera, not a singular entity but a patchwork of everything I have imprinted on due to my avian identity. As a child, wyverns were the first birdlike creatures I encountered, and had the advantage over actual birds to be very cool and interesting to my dinosaur obsessed mind, and therefore all my instincts got thrown into imagining myself as a wyvern. It is an identity I share with Sunahbii, although on their side it is more apparence wise than truly earthen myth inspired. Without further ado, here is a timeline and explanation of my experiences regarding draconity.

My obsession with dragons started as a child, apparently from my parents' point of view as an extension of my dinosaur related shenanigans. Dragon toys were my favorites, and like I adored dinosaurs documentaries, I adored dragon related movies. One of the oldest I can remember is Dragon : a Fantasy Made Real, a mockumentary where I particularly enjoyed the first segment, following a prehistoric wyvern in a world of dinosaurs. It would differ from my later identities by the fact it spit fire and ate minerals, but the wyvern body type, brighter pattern (here an ocellus, a pattern that stayed on my mind still to my adulthood), and sonorous screech were all traits that I already related to, and possibly where my identity incorporating them started.

Around 9 to 12 yo, perhaps more, I started to have an inner world full of wyverns, particularly I liked transforming fictional characters I enjoyed into wyverns and adding them to this inner world as part of the flock. Usually very colorful, with two horns and frills, with varying powers due to the fictional character sources, although I was myself venomous, a trait i had associated with my dream selves since the start (an easy thing to verify as I still have the little note books in which i wrote my flock, drew them, and other stories where I appeared including one with super powers where my persona had venomous claws). I recall the name of one of my hatchlings of that era, Jouheika. The other one has sadly slipped my mind, but they are both still in my heart in a sort of strange, real but not quite way. They are my hatchlings, and I see them as such, but it's a hard feeling to talk to with anyone due to the nonexistant quality of that world. In parallel to that, I also roleplayed as a wyvern in my solo worlds on minecraft, particularly in building flocks with the mo'creature wyverns, another of my imprints.

Then, around 12-15 probably, before our french equivalent of high school, the black drake, sunahbii, appeared. It is... a complicated one to talk about, and I will go in more details on him afterward. Both myself and not, he was i think at first a sort of paraself, as I had slipped into maladaptive daydreaming, an avatar i used in my dissociative fantasies. But soon enough he could talk to me. I have tried to end him a few times, as his existance in my daydreams was riddled with things id rather not have existed, especially to my partially delusional self that had a hard time deciphering what was real, and what was not, and therefore guilt-ridden by things done in daydreams that I had thought real. Perhaps it is that need to dissociate from him that created him as a different entity from me. All that I know, is that he can talk now, and has his own consciousness. More on that in a later paragraph, as his draconity differs from mine.

Again in parallel, I used minecraft to cope with specie dysphoria since a young age. I had modded minecraft to be a good foraging and hunting experience, with a mod that added wings to me. I think mo'creature had become too buggy in later versions to use, and I did not have a flock with me at this point, although I missed that experience.

This period of my life was difficult social wise, I remember mostly the daydreams, and not much of real life. I was bullied from what I know, and retracted into my mind. I recall I had the belief I would shapeshift and escape my human self one day, fantasy that mixed with violent urges as a way to avenge myself from my peers. I was quite misanthropic, in a way a lot of nonhumans are when faced with being othered by ones they don't recognizes as their peers due to specie incongruence.

When I found the otherkin community i was still in the equivalent of middle school/early highschool. My first instinct was obviously to label myself as dragonkin, as it was the symbol of my nonhumanity all the years. However, I did not trust the community : I'd always been rather careful online, and my distrust for people extended to the online world. I made a fake me, mixing my own traits with things I simply invented. Even then, my fake draconic counterpart was quite similar to my avian self : a desertic dragon that could only glide, gold and bronze (not too far from brown and beige), without any sort of breath power. It was quadrupedal however, and had an affinity with water like a crocodilian would, things I'd invented because it made sense for a sort of canyon dweller in my mind to hunt in the river below, closer to speculative biology than introspection. I still like that little critter, but it was never me and more of a fun facade to test the water of the community.

I was first on kinmunity and tumblr. Tumblr i'd approached first due to the cringe compilation featuring the weirdest sides of nonhumanity, but even through that i could see kinship, finding some of the less obviously satirical posts not all that strange.

From my first moment on kinmunity, I started to approach my draconity under the alterhuman lense. My first debuts were on amino and tumblr, where I posted messy attempts at explaining and simplifying this identity, craving for it to be something "more", something spiritual, something that couldn't be "just a psychological thing". I tried meditation, past life regression, invented and reinvented myself altogether in an attempt to make sense of Sunahbii and the differing traits of my wyvernhood.

Then i just dropped it altogether when I discovered myself as a bird. Obviously the draconic experiences were just a way to make sense of my avian nature, and nothing more! And sunahbii? Well, let's not talk about it.

I called myself dragonhearted for at least a year, before I dived back into that identity of mine. But the experience of Sunahbii and mine were so different that I kept switching views, a venomous, colorful wyvern on one side, an eldritch, soul eating beast on the other. I only managed to make sense of it after a particularly bad mental health episode in 2020/2021 made me realize just how autonomous and real Sunahbii was, and that it was, although linked to me, another person altogether (the times of directly talking to him had somehow not clued me to that conclusion).

Since then, I am neither dragonkin nor dragonhearted. Or perhaps both at the same time. I call myself simply draconic, the range of experience I have regarding dragons being too wide to fit a more precise term. Sometimes it's kintype like, in the ways I feel like i should have venom, the ways i've felt crests and colors and flocks and still miss them nowadays, but these things I have grown into, not inherent to my being but accumulated over the years. But how could I tell whether there was an inherent part of me that resonated with those, or if i created my identity from the things I liked, and truthfully, does it matter? Other times my draconity is more detached, in my special interest in myth, the way I love seeing art of draconic creatures, the way they are easier for me to relate to than humans, but sometimes not at all the same kind of creature as i am, such as in books where the western quadrupedal, fire breathing depiction, sometimes magical, is most often depicted.

Amongst dragons i am unique in my animality and fluidity, but it is still amongst dragons that my experience makes the most sense. Nowadays I have stopped racking my brain. I am just whatever my brain tells me i am today, be it a monster hunter creature, a wyvern, or simply a bird. Sometimes i share the shape of Sunahbii, sometimes we are so distinct I wonder how we are twins at all.

My draconity experiences tend to ressemble fictionflickers. My "base" identity as a dragon is a colorful, venomous wyvern. I have facets of identities from the world of minecraft, monster hunter and pandora, and have a particular attachment to those worlds. I also feel connected to a lesser extent to dragon: a fantasy made real, httyd, age of fire, and golden treasure: the great green.