pumastuffs

[pumastuffs]

Human life is way too complicated. Bills, taxes, rent, education, work, insurance, finding a partner… as a wolf, I would’ve played, hunted, fought, starved, got sick, found a mate, had pups, and passed away.

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© plutoxoxi via x/twitter

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I really want to watch Wolf Children again but I'm not sure I'm emotionally ready for it.

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I want more animal forms of affection. I want headpats. I want someone to press close to me. I want to share food with my friends. I want us to just hang out and chill beside each other. I want us to just make sounds at each other to show our camaraderie but don't mean anything in the human language.

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I really wish that therians weren't as capitalized on as they were a few years ago. If you look up mask or animal mask in Amazon you'll find those blank cat masks with the words therian next to it. I feel like that this once again starts to conflate therianthropy with just cosplay. I'm also afraid of people's first time seeing the word therian with just well, arts and crafts? Not just talking about masks but even tails as well. If you look up animal tails you're bound to see therian with it. Like I'm glad it's becoming more well known? But I also kinda wish it wasn't like this

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I need so much more money than I currently have or care to get a loan for for the things I want to do to make the house nicer for me to express my animality. I need to fix the yard so it’s flat and not full of little divets that I might hurt my ankles in. I want a privacy fence so I can crawl around in the grass with my tail on without my neighbors (who we bought the house from after renting for years) can’t see me, and so I can stand outside in the rain completely bare. I’d like some more fruit trees or bushes or whatever so I can forage. A nice little pond or pool to lounge by or in. There was a house I was looking at this time last year that was so cute and had a big yard and a big fence, but my circumstances were weird, so I wasn’t able to get it. It would’ve been really good for this. The house I ended up in is the one we’d been renting for over five years, and the location is nice, but it needs so much work, and we’re paying waaaay too much for it. Idk, doing a lot of yearning and longing for both the animal life and human life I feel I’m supposed to have.

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I’ve got a lot of dog mannerisms and behaviors, but dog as an identity has never truly sung to me, so I chalk that one up to just being around dogs so much and it being fun on a normal human level to act like one.

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Having to physically look up to talk to my work friend gives me kin feels. Probably something about how I should be much smaller, like a cat staring lovingly into the eyes of the person petting them.

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coyote in sagebrush steppe, by Matt Lavin.

found on wikimedia commons

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Not gonna lie as an older (not by much, but grew up with forums) therian it's kind of exhausting to look at the tumblr state of the community. The forums had their own stupidity, but at least we were all kind of in the same grab bag of weird animality, and vague words meant people had to explain themselves, which meant you usually then understood what they were actually saying. Now that people reinvent lukewarm water every two weeks by coining a new words for concepts that were always under therianthrope the whole community feels fractured and bizarre. It just frustrates me that people think they are doing a good thing by coining a new word to "make a spot for a specific type of nonhumans" in a way that just ends up making them seem like a new thing and reinterprets long history of it existing in forums under the general therian label.

Kinda feels like when in the queer community people make up a new "better" definition of an old term that ends up excluding a bunch of people who were using it who are now expected to use the new shiny term.

It's especially frustrating when i feel like the word it ends up as makes less sense than originally. I keep seeing people describe the common experience of phantom shifts that feel like physically having a limb but are not visible, which is... to me the old definition of a phantom shift as physical experiences. No ? A physical experience... would be when you physically change. I can get it for people who see themselves change or have no genuine difference between "real life mythical shapeshifting" and whatever they're experiencing, but... really? are we starting to claim feeling a good ol' phantom shift is shapeshifting? because it feels real? are we just re writing what physical means now. Ugh. I feel like we're losing so much of the nuance of therianthropic experience over pointless renaming for things to feel more validating and real. a phantom limb is not less important bc it's not physical as in physically touchable and visible to you. if any brainfeel is physical therianthropy bc it pertains to your body / you feel it in your body, then... literally all therianthropy is physical. congratulation now physical therianthropy means nothing.

signed, a rambling frustrated big cat who doesn't know what words are supposed to mean anymore

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Been thinking a lot about the things that seem to bring me the most inner peace as a werewolf, and the way that the community seems to be drifting away from being an experience driven group, towards being a fandom.

I want to put these two things together into some kind of essay or plea for change, but I'm not sure how I guess. I've let a lot of pain and frustration build up around the topic, and now I don't know what to say or how to make people listen.

Very open for suggestions and input - I like brainstorming this kind of stuff with other members of the community since I frequently miss out on perspectives different from the way I approach things.

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Little doodle to celebrate spring

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Finally got around to coloring this doodle from a few weeks ago

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let's chill

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I've been stepping away from the Alterhuman community and it's making me think that 80% of the distress people may feel over understanding their identity goes away if you stop just spiraling over it by constantly questioning every why and how.

Honestly I think it's a thing I miss from old blogs where a lot of what was shared was mostly active experiences, aka, idk "I have a prey drive. I went on a mountain retreat with friends and processed rabbits we caught. This was a deeply spiritual experience and gratifying to my carnivore instincts" instead of "I confirmed marten because otter was 9% wrong on Vibes and I think my DNA is not human because I feel bad in my body. Here are 12 words I coined for my very specific precise experience of it." or other things that are more... Describing oneself without ever stepping outside of your own identity to actually experience things.

Maybe this makes no sense. I just think a lot of what the Tumblr nonhuman community amounts to rn is kinda paradoxical and ridiculous, especially with therians, because it's just a bunch of over thinking and no acting. Like no wonder you feel dysphoric about being an animal you've spent the last fucking 10h spiraling in your own head about deeply human concepts watching a deeply human screen. Tear apart a pomegranate with your teeth you'll feel better. Jesus. Put some enrichment in that beast.

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[pumastuffs]

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Instructions for Traveling West”

[Text ID: “you’re homesick / for all the lives / you’re not living.”]