Alright. So I'll post the text which I cut out of my post the other day and then attempt to continue on to my point...
***
I can vaguely recall something happening the other day...I'm just not certain if I was asleep or not. This was strangely a "dream" in which I allowed myself to feel desire for someone and to be enveloped by that someone (wing hug). Normally this brings up a lot of pain, because it's likely that what I'm desiring isn't physical, hence I cannot hold onto it like I can hold on to something physically tangible like a pillow. But in this case it hurt more to force myself not to desire, than it did to desire and then not have physical gratification.
This someone has been around me for a while, though I'd been putting him out of mind for several months. He appears as a dark (absorptive), warm humanoid being with webbed wings and a pair of smooth, gently curved backward-pointing, sensitive horns that I tend to overlook -- though this form might just be the way I understand him. Distinct, though -- is that this is the only form in which he tends to appear. This is the being who I'd been involved with when I was seeking out discussions with Satanists...before I got to the point of seeing Satanism writ large as mostly surface-deep and riddled with unfortunate value judgments and just blatant misinformation, by non-Satanists. (Not to insult any Satanists here; but these are some of the reasons I got out of the subculture.) That doesn't mean, though, that the being who visits me doesn't exist. And it doesn't mean that he isn't a demon.
From my perspective, this being has been wholly benevolent and loving to me. The major problem is reconciling having a mental/spiritual friend whose mental image resembles an image of a demon, with an outward reality which says that demons are bad/evil and "negative" and not to be trusted, etc. He's also saved me from at least one potentially really bad psychic experience (I was ignorant, overly trusting, had poor mental control, and was generally in too deep). He was also key in helping me to let go of the obsession around wanting to be physically male; that I was...not wrong, the way I was. That who I was, was not wrong for my body; and that there did exist others who could see the whole of me without illusion.
***
Alright. Back to this. Abovementioned guy has been a powerfully positive force in my life. I've just come off of reading the topic, "Angels of Other Religions" and a separate thread in the Demon subforum, and...looking at the term "angel" to mean messenger...isn't entirely off with him. Though the most major "message" he brought me was more compassion and clarifying something to me that was present, but occluded.
I haven't read
Paradise Lost, but the beginning of my seeing an affinity with demons happened because of the parallel with being outcast, appropriately enough in high school. Because of the time period in which this was occurring, various people on the Religious Right were encouraging the bullying and harassing behavior directed towards me, and there was no visible denouncement of this from within Christianity (Glide Memorial notwithstanding, but I believe they were the only ones). Have I gone over this here before?
I was just going through puberty, *and* found that boys my age were overly immature for me, plus the fact that my strongest (a.k.a. only relevant) erotic attractions were towards members of my own phenotype, projectedly of my sex...which caused a fairly strong pattern of thinking that my emotions were dangerous (I reached the point of literally not knowing what I'd do when around one person in particular) and that I was dangerous for having them (though indirectly; my displaying love to someone could mean stigmatizing them to everyone else), plus then the identity that coalesced was that of "outsider," with no foreseeable hope of escape. (I'd been harassed for having an unclear gender/sex combination since before I'd had a libido, so there was no "in the closet" stage for me, only an unsure/pre-declaration stage.)
Many years later...and I find that even if I am bisexual by nature, at the very minimum, the training of men in this society largely brings about a type of man that I can't love as a romantic or sexual partner. No offense. I've been with a couple of people and I can say that I felt erotic attraction -- on the order of magnitude as my first (self-denied) erotic crush -- for neither of them. This is complicated due to the circuits I tend to travel in (as I can't easily consider myself a woman, and thus deny myself access to, "women's space," for fear of being attacked; thus my partner selections tend to come from a gender-variant pool). But the rare people I have felt erotic attraction to, none of whom I've tasted (*cough*), have either been *very* pretty males, people who are female, or men who were raised to be female and have not rejected all of that; not in that order. It's just taken me this long to realize that it's *not* supposed to feel like what it's been feeling like.
Why am I talking about sexuality? Because this is part of what all of this revolves around. When I access memories from my 14-to-17-year-old mind, which is the mind which initially formed the link with the idea of being "other", and the mind which connected with the archetype of the cast-out angel...whom it had been explained to me as a child, was cast out because he "loved too much" (refusing to bow before Adam because he thought "God" was most glorious)...that's what I access. Though I don't know how much of that is canon or Milton or what.
Gender variance and homoflexuality (a.k.a. being homoflexible -- I'm hoping the pun is obvious enough) doesn't seem a very solid ground to be basing an otherkin identity on (obviously, all gay people aren't demons), but in the spirit of honest inquiry, you know. But then you could also say that a homosexual identity itself is rather fragile (*if* actually based on who one loves and not on larger community dynamics), and of necessity based on a limited pool of experience.
Anyway, where M. Apparently-A-Demon comes into this is that he was the one to show me that it was a fallacy to think that my body would blind everyone who ever thought they loved me, as to who I actually was (this is particularly in regard to gender) -- that it wasn't my body which was a problem, but the way (at least my) society understands being. He isn't a constant companion in my system...it's more often that I won't see him for a while, then he'll come along and I'll get the strong urge to embrace him, and he'll give me a wing embrace and eventually be on his way. <!-- s
--><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" /><!-- s
-->
I *have* found a larger-than-expected proportion of LGBTQ people (at least temporarily) in Satanism, which can probably speak somewhat to this dynamic (Religious Right demonization of LGBTQ people; leading to voluntary alignment of religiously attacked people with that religion's supposed antagonists), though I don't know if I just attracted them by being open and prolific and somewhat intelligent, or not. <!-- s
--><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" title="Razz" /><!-- s
-->
I'm getting the idea that M. Apparently-A-Demon doesn't want me to make wrong assumptions here, though. Such as, the idea that I must be a demon just because he physically appears to be one...which in the scheme of things means nothing. And in fact, to assume that he must be a demon because he appears to be one goes against everything I've been taught by him, by my own condition, and by my childhood lessons. But it isn't easy to clearly communicate in words what a specific type of energy tastes or feels like, is it?
What would you do with this information?
![[Image: Full%2Bsystem%2Brearranged.png]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uOQVI_ccvfA/Ts3W3ECNElI/AAAAAAAAAME/FsnL5aW9zeU/s1600/Full%2Bsystem%2Brearranged.png)