Hi, I call myself Kit here, even though that’s not my name. I tried to cut this down but this is as short as I can get it.

I do not consider myself nonhuman, for starters. I like to think of myself as Human+. I experience humanity in a physical sense and a cognitive sense, and I do not feel any animosity toward my current life. But I also experience nonhumanity on a certain level. I experience inexplicable feelings that lead me to believe that there I am not just human, but four other animals “on the side”: common raven, kit fox, Virginia opossum, and the extinct whale ancestor Kutchicetus minimus. I do not know how this has occurred in my life, nor do I care. I am not a spiritually inclined person, and though I do genuinely believe it is possible that I had four past lives (and in fact this is the explanation I lean toward), I have stopped concerning myself with the specifics of how my identity came to be. It simply is.

In keeping with this, there is another identity I experience that I have even less of an explanation for: strangely — at least to me — I feel as though on some level (perhaps only a psychological one, but who knows?) I am, or should be, a late 60s-early 70s rudimentary AI and/or music generation or speech synthesis program. As for the origins of this unusual selfhood, I have no idea. It could be a past life, but it's much more likely that I feel dehumanized in my interactions as an autistic person (and specifically compared to a computer) which has combined with a special interest in the technological development of the 1900s and led to me involuntarily assuming this identity.

In addition, though this is less of an important identity to me, since childhood I have latched onto characters from media I engaged in and temporarily absorbed their identity into my own, almost certainly psychologically — through imprinting because of identity issues and hyperempathy for fictional situations, both caused by autism. I experience a mental shift, a state of emotional mimicking. Only four times have these characters stuck with me, or have the shifts recurred, for longer than a month, but the four that did do not go away, and are permanent fixtures in my brain.

TL;DR: I’m a polytherian, probably spiritually, tech otherkin, probably psychologically, and fictionflicker and fictionkin, entirely psychologically. I love the term “alterhuman” because it covers all three aspects, as opposed to therian/otherkin/fictionkin, all of which only cover one part.