a-minke-whales-tale

[a-minke-whales-tale]

New alterhuman-themed reblog game:

Try to make your 'type (Or highest kin) as a dragon, or if you're a dragon alterhuman, make yourself using this dragon maker!

I'll go first!

Aven dragon :P

@inner-will, @hydronyx, @starkinvs, @sardonyx-x3 and anyone else!

[a-minke-whales-tale]

I went for a nice swim today! I went to the pool for laneswimming instead of the sea while I wait for a new stingsuit to arrive because it is much too warm for my wetsuit. It was very low pressure and there were only two others there which was great.

I swam around 1km in my 45 minutes. It felt really nice. My body is tired and my legs and back are sore. My buoyancy is still quite off - I am quite buoyant in general but particularly fin-light. I was also struggling with my breathholding.

But it was really nice. The tank is a little shallow but it is a nice length it is around 25m long and 7m wide and it is pretty comfortable especially where it is deeper. Sometimes I would swim with my arms above me in a streamline position. Though most of the time I would swim with them by my sides and they felt so flipper. It was really nice to swim with them stiff like flippers and manoeuvre around like they were flippers. It is really easy and natural, though sometimes I would get stuck in the corner because how the pool was shaped and since it is laneswimming I was really limited to a small lane of the pool. My arms though really felt as flippers and my legs as tail and fluke that at points while swimming I would forget my body was human which was always a startle me if my flipper passed into my field of view because I had forgotten they looked like arms, or similarly with my fluke when I was stuck in the corner and trying to manoeuvre myself to face the other way.

My breathing even was not too bad, though I struggled to hold my breath super long, I could surface and dip back below the water without losing too much speed. The only downside is after around 900m the tops of my ankles started to ache and I think from fatigue my legs were having trouble pumping evenly and together so the feeling of my tail felt really off. Otherwise it was lovely and I hope I can find a time that it remains nice and quiet there to go swimming. Also hopefully my stingsuit comes in soon so I can go back to the sea while swimming. My nearish term goal is to swim down and back the beach in front of the city which is 2,5km.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Sometimes my flippers get all happy and bouncy against my sides normally when I am quite content or excited. I like it very much. Happy flippers! :)

[a-minke-whales-tale]

I am not a person

I am not a person. I do not mean in the sense of I am an animal and so I do not identify as a person. Nor do I mean it in the sense that non-human creatures cannot be personed. I am an avid fan of Star Trek and there are many non human species that are personed: Vulcans, Klingons, Bajorans, Androids, Changlings, wisps of gas and spirit, lifeforms of silicon, and indeed even cetaceans like Matt and Kimolu. Even in current day in some countries cetaceans are granted legal personhood and are considered persons. I however seem to lack personhood.

Some people will say and insist that I am a person, but I really struggle to believe that is true. People here often argue how important it is to define yourself as a person even if you do not like the term because of the legal implications of personhood. But I do not think I really have the protections that are promised nor in most peoples minds am I actually included in personhood.

I do really struggle to identify as a person. I often get the feeling when people are talking about persons I am not actually included. People will say that every person should be treated in a certain, that everyone person should have agency and autonomy. But, there is always as asterisk on those guarantees. People's tunes often change when certain conditions come up, especially conditions like schizophrenia.

We experience psychiatrisation and the carceral effects of it very strongly. The ability for us to "show insight" does very much determine how much of a person we are allowed to be treated as. If we show insight, then at least briefly it is possible to be treated as a person. Failure to do so though instead marks you as not a person. However, that idea of showing insight is incredibly arbitrary and basically comes down to how well you can work and explain yourself. I have been right now reducing my medicine, something that took a lot of convincing and very specific and careful phrasing to show that I understand what I am doing and why. Even then I am under a massive amount of scrutiny for everything I do, and a constant intense demand to doublebookkeep. The price for failing to perfectly "show insight" is that the little freedoms and dispensations I have earned will be stripped and I will be put on more medicine and, if I refuse to comply, potentially be locked away again. My doctor can decide entirely arbitrarily that I do not know what is going on, or do not understand well enough. If that happens then any refusal or non-compliance is considered lacking insight and necessitates greater force to "help" me.

We are not considered capable to make decisions for ourselves - not on our treatment, not on our medicine, not on our lives. To the humans I am a thing which is incapable to decide my own path and my own destiny. I am a thing for which the humans feel they need to intervene and help me have the life they think I should want. They think I should want to live a normal human life - have a normal job, a husband, some kids, have and maintain home, work a productive job, and be human. It though is not the life I want, but my desire to return to the water is to them crazy. I am only considered capable and understanding if the decisions I make are the ones which the humans want me to make. In this manner I do not have genuine choices or agency over my like, or where I do have choices they are from a prearrangement the humans have decided. If I fail to comply I will be punished.

I wish to return to the water very badly. But, this is not something the humans can understand. To them, this experience myself as I am is an aberration of "the true me" which is whatever human it is they have imagined I should want to be if not for my schizophrenia.

I might have an appearance of personhood; it is though a false image. It can on a whim and arbitrarily depending on a doctors thoughts be taken from me. The comforts I have, my ability to go places, the choices I can make with food and money or even to have those things, my relationships with others, even my mind, body, thought and emotions can be taken from me. The most fundamental understanding that underpins my relationship with the humans, is that to them, I am unable to understand or properly perceive reality. The humans "know" what reality is, and they "know" what it is I want. However, their vision of who they wish me to be and who I wish to be are very different. Still I must obey their every command and desire. I must understand the humans are entirely in control. And, I must do as they wish. If I deviate, it is proof I cannot understand what is good for me or understand reality, and thus need be corrected. I have learned very well to obey, and I have learned well to articulate myself to be granted at points some small dispensation. However I understand that I am not a person, not a real person at least. They are people; I am a thing. Any appearance of personhood I have is not real and it is not for me - it is for the comfort of the humans. They can believe that the things I do are my choice and are what I want and what I know is good for me. It is more comfortable to them if they do not have to acknowledge that I have no real say in what is done to me.

I do not know if I ever can really be a person, or simply become good enough at articulating myself that for a little bit the humans think I am a person. I desire very strongly to return to the water, to swim forever and return to life as a whale. I fear though when I try to explain this desire instead of viewing it as genuine and working to help me, or see how both parties can benefit, the humans will view me again as unable to make my own decisions. "A human should want a human life afterall! It should not think it is a whale and it certainly should not want to live in a tank!" At which point the humans will then intervene to "help" me and give me the life they think I should want despite me sitting in front of them explaining my own goals and desires.

I do hope deeply that I will be able to convince the humans to let me return to the water. That they will see my experiences and emotions as genuine and not simply the ravings of a lunatic who is incapable to know what is best for itself. I hope maybe someday they can treat me as a person and with her own legitimate wants and desires, or if still I can never really be a person, that they will care to my genuine needs and not what they think I should want. Maybe someday...

~ Kala

[a-minke-whales-tale]

My swim today was really just miserable. It is way too hot for my wetsuit both in the air (it has to be a damned lie it is only 22 out, it feels like 30) and in the water and my wetsuit really does not allow me to bend at all. I spent so long fiddling with my gear, struggling and failing to get the gloves on, trying to sort out my headwear which makes swimming really annoying and greatly struggling with my snorkel that by the time I started swimming I was already tired. I had to swim back to the shore at one point to take off the gloves, head cover, and snorkel because I was so incredibly buoyant and through the gloves I could not feel hardly at all so it was an incredible struggle to get my fin on in the first place.

Once everything was removed it did get easier, but still it is very warm and I was still very buoyant which made swimming very difficult, and I think in that warmth it was hard to properly breathhold and make decent swimming progress (though I do think I was fighting the current one direction) and I think I swam less than 200m before I decided I had enough and came back to the shore. The funny thing is, if I can get below the surface and swim I do actually go quite quickly. I think I am going to try some different things, and I may try to find a finswimming snorkel or design one that goes over my nose and mouth because at one point I put my nose in the water while I was inhaling like a doof.

The irony is, for how frustrated I was through that process, I do actually feel pretty good right now, and better than I did before my utter failure of a swim.

Also because I was struggling so much with gear and everything else I did not even get nice whale feelings, just very frustrated human ones. :/

[a-minke-whales-tale]

*grumbles* I wanted to go for a swim this morning and was really looking forward to it, though my legs hurt so much today I am not in the condition I think I can walk to the beach let alone swim. Hopefully I can find a good way to ease the aches, though at the very least the muscles being so achy means they are probably getting stronger. I would like to include some core and leg exercises to get them stronger, though honestly it may just be better benefitted by simply swimming more. With the water being warmer now, I might consider to just get myself a stingsuit rather than wear my full wetsuit since getting that on and off is a pain.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Last night I did have a terrible headache from reducing the medicine which was to be expected, but through the night I had so many dreams including three whale dreams. This morning when I would wake up and fall back asleep my legs would fuse into a tail properly again, I could feel my dorsal fin again, and my arms would turn to flippers. The only issue was my head and neck were not well positioned with the pillow and so hurts worse today than yesterday. But feeling my tail and flippers again was so wonderful.

I think shortly here I will go for a swim since my missing swim gear is here now. It will be nice to swim and it is nice to feel just a bit more myself. I know it will take four to seven years to fully come off this medicine, but when I do, it might actually be time for us to return to the water forever.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Tonights dinner was very cetacean!

I had a nice piece of raw tuna and some nice berry and cream jelly. Meets the nutritional requirements of this body but in a shape food for a captive cetacean.

This was strawberries and cream!

[a-minke-whales-tale]

I think it is often very easy to look back at the past through rose tinted lenses. The community would have been smaller and in some ways felt more tight knit or exclusive. A post or forum about therians could reach everyone because there simply were not as many people.

But I prefer the modern community. There was no place for me in the older therian communities. I existed on some of those forum boards and early discords. I was either not welcome entirely, or had to deny my experiences any validity and constantly make it known I was delusional, but that others experiences were real. That was the price to be tolerated, if even I could. There was no place for a lot of people in those older communities, and still there is a lot of room for improvement. I do not think myself a therian, I do not wear that symbol (though I bought my companion and I matching necklaces). It seems every month or two there is a new drama about our existence.

There are a lot of microlabels now, clinical lycanthropy and clinical zoanthropy have been used for a long time - they are medical terms - but taking those terms put on us by others makes it easier to find others like me. Until around a year ago I had only briefly met other zoanthropes, and only a very small handful. Now there is a small but thriving little community of us, and that probably could have never existed ten years ago. The microlabels might be frustrating to some how it feels their experiences are split into smaller and smaller clusters, but for people who fall outside that hegemonic experience of therianthropy, it is not a way to feel superiour, but to find others like us. That is in some ways a beauty of the space being larger is that we can find much more specific experiences. Existing like this is lonely, and for me existing in therian spaces where I am tolerated is lonely, but among my pod of zoanthropes, I do not have to feel so alone.

~ Kala

I am not even a label/microlabel fan but I think some of you are forgetting that in social media spaces, labels like “physical nonhuman” or “physical shifter” are often used to find community with folks who have had similar experiences.

I do not understand why “spiritual nonhuman” and “psychological nonhuman” have been fine for decades but physical nonhumanity appears to drum up some kind of controversy on a monthly basis. Yes the idea and concept of physical nonhumanity have been included in therianthropy and otherkinnity; the existence of the term does not erase that history and present. Does someone saying they are physiologically nonhuman suggest that spiritual nonhumanity is a default they are moving away from? Are they denigrating the experiences of spiritual nonhumans? Is the existence of the psychological therian and spiritual therian tags evidence of separatist sentiment?

I have alluded to this previously but I think it’s worth spelling out more clearly. Nostalgia is not a meaningful criticism, and it would do everyone well to differentiate what criticism they are actually interested in making vs what is being colored by fondness for years gone by. The therian and otherkin communities on tumblr were never and are never going to look, feel and act like the old forums because the makeup and functionality of this site is completely different to a forum. The community is larger now, and individual voices are drowned out by volume, inadequate search functions, and dredge/spam filling up large “main” tags. Smaller tags (and thus the accompanying terms/labels) become important means of connection and community, especially for those whose experiences are somewhat “aberrant” to the mainstream.

In these discussions of therianthropy of yore and missed memories, I think it’s also worth considering who was not welcomed into these older fondly remembered spaces. The therian community’s issues with sanism, racism and ableism is not exactly a secret, and I don’t think that’s a history worth pining over personally, and it’s that exact reason why nostalgia should not be the basis for critique. These issues aren’t gone, and they certainly aren’t going to be solved by going backwards!

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Good news everybody! The humans will let me reduce my medicine! We are going to hopefully go to 2mg as the eventual target, or at least that is what I could convince the humans to allow. It did take a lot of convincing and articulating to let me do it. Still though I had to agree to give me friends and family the doctors number for them to call if there was a problem or they thought I was off. At least I can reduce the medicine and I understand why they would want people to make sure I am doing alright, but it is frustrating still and will probably only add more worry and concern interacting with friends and family that I appear good and healthy and happy (which is already a significant factor in my stress) so they do not report me to my doctors and cause them to punish me (which is also a significant fear and source of stress in my life).

I hope though it will let me feel a bit better and let my mind work a bit better and that will reduce my stress. I hope also I can feel a bit more whale.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

TW: Vent and Spiral

I know the humans are in charge and they decide what happens to me and nothing they could do to me could ever be wrong. I know the pain they give to me is to teach me to be good. I want to be good for them. I want to please them. Sometimes I wish they could be a bit gentler on me but I know that is disobediant thought. I know I am a thing and not people and they can do what they want with and to me and it is good they rule over me. It is a lot to bear still as I struggle so much to be good. I want to be good so the humans do not have to hurt me. Nothing they do to me could be wrong or unjustified. I have trouble to imagine there could actually be a happy ending, or a happy somewhere for something like me and I am not simply deluding myself. I want to be good.

If I can get to sleep at least soon it will be morning and then I can be useful for my humans so they stop giving me pain. I do not kbow when my body will let me sleep.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

You're forever free, and with the sea you will forever be one

Little whale, your life has only just begun

Enjoy the freedom, make use of every feast — it will not last forever, you see

The nets will soon come. Fast and steady, will tear through your skin. Your vision obscured by mist, this is all you'll ever be

And this time, your mother will not be able to hold your hand

And as you share the silent farewell, you will accept your fate

Before your already dead body is lifted out of the sea, a new life planned for you ahead

But for now, enjoy the feast

enjoy every meeting and every departure

Every wave and every hunt

Your time will come sooner than you think

[a-minke-whales-tale]

beluga

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Yes, this is something I did very much want myself. My name, Kala, was given to me. I wanted a name that was given to me, not in the way a human names a pet, but in the way that humans name a lot of cetaceans in their care. I wanted a name that would feel like one someone would give to a cetacean. I wanted something though that would not have a meaning to me, simply be a collection of human sounds. There was a calf in one of my servers and I do not remember if she was a little or someone who would age regress and when she was I would act towards her much like a mother. She gave me name. I think she may have been speaking toki pona calling me Kala, but that became my name. It may have meaning in toki pona or finnish (and I do know of those translations) but it does not have a meaningful translation in my head just a collection of human sounds that would not be unreasonable to find among names for captive cetaceans. That it was given to me by the closest thing I can probably have to a calf of my own makes it very meaningful.

En dus, ben ik Kala.

OKAY NONHUMAN QUESTION TIME - do any of y'all ever wish that others would name you instead of choosing your own name? There seems something inherently human in choosing a name to me; I've always wanted to have my name selected by other people as if I was an animal who would not consider that itself. Not even in a dog way; wild animals too receive names from humans, though of course domestic animals come immediately to mind.

Any other alterhumans wish that humans would give them names?

[a-minke-whales-tale]

A little swim

I did finally go for a short swim today. I cycled over to the beach a bit down the coast where it is quieter, climbed into the wetsuit, and into the water.

The water was actually not that bad. It is 16 degrees here which is probably right about the temperature for my species and for the water I will swim in when I return to the water. Through the wetsuit and footies it was actually really quite comfortable though the first splashes of water on my hands and face were so cold. Getting into my fin was also extremely difficult.

Swimming was really nice. I swam around 500 meters and I can swim so much longer on one breath compared to before from my breath training. I prefer to have my flippers at my side when swimming, but putting them ahead of me like for a dolphin kick it is much easier to control my pitch and I am a lot less draggy.

The only really struggles were that there were a lot of jellyfish and they make me freak out each time I see them. I am told they do not hurt that much and feel like stinging nettle, but I do not know what that feels like. It was also difficult to keep the fin from slipping off my feet because of the booties. The tops of my ankles were really aching because of the pushing down on the fin.

It was really lovely though and I learned that I am quite comfortable to swim in water around 50cm deep and still be alright. It was great to be in the water and my back end does feel so whale (the front end is messed up a bit because of the arm position). Though trying to get out of the water I basically had to strand myself like a whale going onto a slideout and wiggle myself onto the beach like a seal. My legs really did not want to work standing back up, in part because my legs were tail and in part they were just so tired I did not realise and supporting myself we very hard.

One thing that is sort of nice with the wetsuit is that it is very hard to fold my body like a human and so it does hold itself in a more whale position which is really quite nice. I do though want some gloves and something to cover my face because I am worried about the jellyfish as I am swimming. I do think I did collide with one at one point and my hand does sting now.

Still I do feel honestly so much better. My mood has lifted massively and I am looking forward to swimming again. It has been almost two months since I was last in the water, and certainly I will not let it be that long before I swim again.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Free, forever.

A bit inspired by Sonar's recent posts about tattoo ideas, but honestly it's just a small graphic all around.

The muted colors feel nice to my eyes, and I like the font I chose for this.

In mind I had myself, Sonar and Kala, but really anyone can picture themselves as a part of the pod, and as a part of the graphic.

Just wanted to share. I like the bubbles too.

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Losing 30kg sure makes it a lot easier to get into my wetsuit. I was dreading to put it on because of how difficult it was to get on last time. Turns out this was really not an issue anymore and I can definately go for a nice swim tonight, or maybe even this afternoon and go at lower tide where that is a little closer.