misunderstandings

Instructions

hi . concerning title? maybe. i'm okay though no need to worry i just couldn't think of a better one hello, i'm myzus, and i used to think i was a therian. in late october-early november 2022, i discovered the therian community on the clock app, as well as quadrobics and the costumey parts [masks and tails and paws and such]. i thought it was so cool that these people find each other, and quadrobics was astonishing [how do you jump that high on all fours??]. i haven't ever fit in. it's often felt like i'm just pretending to be human, and when i learned the definition of a therian, i thought it matched up pretty well to what i felt, and so i started calling myself one. i made friends inside the community and felt like i fit in, and i even fought against someone mocking therians and got them to stop. i felt accepted where i was. soon, i started quadrobics. at first in secret, then my sister caught me. she thought it was weird at first, but eventually she started doing it too. our parents learned of it somehow, and knew its connection to therianthropy, but i said i wasn't a therian and it just became a fun, if slightly weird, activity. i made a mask, a lazily painted calico cat mask with no fur or felt or mesh in the eyes, and i got a fake fox tail. eventually i ended up getting two more tails and many more masks, but i haven't made a mask in a while because i can't add felt or fur. the only one with felt and fur was made by my friend and is my favorite. i rarely did vocals, but it felt nice when i did [possibly similar to vocal stims] i felt something similar to euphoria with a tail and a mask on, especially in public [just at the playground and one trampoline park, nothing crazy], but it probably just felt good to not be human for a while, because i experience a similar happiness when i think about cosplaying/dressing as something that is non-human but also not real [if you know you know]. i don't fully believe in past lives, but i was willing to give it a chance back then. i also thought i shifted, but i was wrong. my phantom shifts, feeling a theriotype's body parts on one's own body, were probably just my imagining the feeling randomly; i didn't have mental shifts, despite faking them to seem more 'real' because i had seen people invalidating nonshifting therians; there was one shift that i thought was mimicking an experience of a past death where the theriotype fell from a tree and landed on its head because i had a terrible headache, but i most likely just had a migraine or something similar; sensory shifts might have been products of being overwhelmed; dream shifts were probably because i thought about my theriotypes often, because all of this was new and i felt like i'd figured something out. i would also sometimes feel 'shifty', or more animal-like in my reactions than human, which i still do, but i don't attribute it to therianthropy anymore. i don't know why it happens, but it came with things like not talking much or at all, being more sensitive to stimuli, being avoidant of touch and distrustful of strangers, which all also come with stress or overstimulation. the pressure of acting 'normal' all day can also bring up feelings of being wrong, out of place, or non-human when i can finally 'drop the act'. the 'strong connection' i felt and still feel to animals and nature are also not because of being a therian, but because of curiosity of and fascination with those things. i think nature is interesting and i like to be in and interact with it, because it just feels...right. that's about it. if there's any other reasons i may or may not be a therian or things i should consider, please tell me. byebye !!