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hm
So.. I’m trying to understand about this whole copinglink/otherkin thing.
Otherkin: Identifying as a non-human non-physically. Can be psychological, like happening due to trauma, etc, brain functions, or spiritual, like if you believe you reincarnated, ECT. Otherkinity can assist with or be used for coping. It is an identity that cannot be chosen willingly.
Copinglink: identifying as a non-human non-physically in order to cope, specifically for coping. Nevertheless an identity, but willfully chosen.
Now, referring back to the point of psychological kin. Say one awakened to being kin after a trauma. This helped them cope. This is an identity. So only if they willfully chose it, knowingly and consciously chose this identity, this would be considered copinglink? What if you find you were wrong and are not that identity, or any non-human at all, but you truly believed you were during that time of coping? Was that copinglink all along but you called yourself otherkin? Where is the line? A non-human identity originating from mental illness, and then disappearing when things are not so stressful, is that copinglink?
Please help me understand.
If it felt like an otherkin identity at the time, experiencing shifts, unable to be pushed away, not chosen and bringing with it the same emotional intensity, but then disappearing *entirely* when life isn’t as stressful, it may have been a fictionflicker (if fictional) or a long cameo shift that ended up being a copinglink. Which is fine. People are mistaken about kintypes all the time. I’ve been mistaken about like three or four of them, in the past. It doesn’t mean that the experience wasn’t meaningful or that it didn’t seem to fit the words I was using to describe it at the time. It just means that it turned out, after some time, to reveal itself as another sort of experience. That’s what happened with my cat-heartedness, twice, actually. xD I used to get a lot of feline cameo shifts to the point that once I considered I might have a feline theriotype, and then many years later I thought I was Cheshire Cat-kin. I turned out to be wrong, but the experiences overlap in places, so it was an honest mistake and doesn’t make it a bad thing.
I guess you can compare it to sexual orientation or gender identity. For example: many transmasculine people go through a period of identifying as lesbians before realizing that they’re trans.
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