I've been browsing through a number of threads and websites; and otherwise, reading offline, all day; so I hope you'll forgive any lack of ...verbosity on my end. I'm pretty complicated, so if something doesn't make sense here, feel free to ask. I may not have the answers you're looking for, and some things may be too personal to share, but you can always ask. <!-- s

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Several years ago (around my early twenties, I believe) I was more into 'kin and therian subculture, though sometime back there I stopped...largely for concerns about being accepted. I'm not a very social person, but the mental weight of wondering who would accept me and who would reject or hate me if they knew who I was weighed heavily at that time. (Now I know that it is more the false ideas that may be dredged up by charged words I use, or which are brought to mind by the way I look or conduct myself, which will cause some to attack me; not who I actually am.) But then, I've not had an easy life...
The two things which may factor in here are the concepts that 1) I experience myself as plural (I have more than one identity state), and 2) I have an organic psychiatric condition which affects my perception and cognition. The second state, I'm medicated for -- so it doesn't affect me as seriously as it could, at this point. The main issues with it which remain are having to deal with anxiety, fear and psychic pain -- and the self-feeding spirals these can engender when those tendencies are paired with obsession -- plus medication side-effects (in particular, being driven to sleep 12+ hours a day, which leaves me with a lot fewer waking hours than most).
The plurality, at present, is just a fact of life. It's how my mind works. Though that could be an entire post unto itself. My psych team
does consider me dissociative, and at times I have a tough time grounding myself.
After these things are out of the way...basically, my lived positionality makes it so that it is difficult to go about life thinking everything is happy and good. I was harassed for a good six years growing up because of my gender expression, my intelligence, my supposed sexuality, my defiance, and my race. (I did get the distinct feeling that I was expected to be stupid because of the confluence of my race and my sex -- though in the particular situation I'm recalling, this was sourced from a teacher.) During the same time, home was not as safe or supportive as it could have been because of one of my parents' mental illnesses, once I was in high school (we used to fight on a daily basis).
I know I was dissociating in 6th grade (I had time loss of about thirty minutes at a time while brushing my teeth), which would have made me 11; this was the same time as the sexual harassment started. I can clearly recall dissociating in 9th grade (staring at homework all afternoon only to finish it quickly at 1 or 2 AM), which is when I was largely isolated, and being harassed at school for being too intelligent to be a girl.
The fights at home didn't start until I came out as lesbian, at maybe 16 (though I can't consider myself entirely lesbian now, as I am at times male, and at times attracted to [very] select men). It wasn't until I got to college and learned what "transgender" meant, and had "lesbian" redefined as by default "cissexual", that I started IDing as FTM (female-to-male) transgender. ...I don't ID as FTM now. I'm multiple, which encompasses the gender differences. If I have to identify myself genderwise, however, I say that I'm gender variant, because that seems to be the only gender category I fit that there isn't a bunch of cultural garbage attached to.
But back in college, I felt that everything except my academics and my few friends were turned against me, and I felt like I couldn't fall any further, socially. So I started to examine communities online...particularly spiritually-oriented ones. This is how I (eventually) started seeking out Satanism, drawing from the time in my teens when I felt I had literally been cast out of my society. (Parallel there to being cast out of Heaven, though I did not know enough about Christianity or Christian literature to know that the source of this metaphor was
Paradise Lost, and thus not canon.)
This was at the time when there were actually some Satanist forums I knew of which weren't all mind-control cults, or otherwise heavily contributed to (or owned) by trolls. I did see a thread in the Demon subforum here, about Satan, but...I'd rather not get into...that.
I believe it was after I got into Satanism, or at least in parallel to it, that I started exploring both the otherkin and multiple tangents. I believe that after some searching, I eventually identified as a demon. Then as the Satanist forums were shutting down some years later, I did take a look at what was at the time the only above-ground demonolatry sect online...which at the time, at least, expressly discouraged demonkin from joining (probably thinking that the only reason a demonkin would join was because they wanted to be worshipped by the humans?). In any case, I checked out one of their books, and it basically freaked me out and gave no reason as to "why Satan?" or "why Demons?", so I left it alone. But I didn't go back to IDing as demon. It just seemed to have too many drawbacks to me, at the time.
I continued to lurk and at times post in otherkin forums, at the time experimenting with ID as naga, due to a specific snakelike metaphysical...reflex that I have had, relating to a specific life event. However, I think that if we take all the social stigma away from IDing as demon, it probably fits me a lot better.
If we're going to get into "why demon?"...I'm not as up on my otherkin community research as I'd like to be, but chaos is one of the things that actually fits my psyche pretty well. Things like interests and career plans change so often that I have a hard time keeping up with them. I've actually had to resort to writing (by hand and on computer) in order to be able to remind myself of prior selves' thoughts and priorities. In the past I've generally opted for having one to a few close friends, though of course that has devastating consequences when one or more of the set outgrow each other, or when certain of my selves don't like said "friends;" or when said friends turn abusive, which has happened in the past. This in effect conditioned me to be a loner, because I'd rather not have relationships than be in abusive ones.
Because of my conditioning, it might be obvious that I have some rather unusual reactions to people whom the word "righteous" can be applied to (outside of surfer slang), considering that at the time I was growing up, people who called themselves "good" and "righteous" (and "holy") were preaching hate, encouraging my abusers, and probably would have incited another Holocaust if they were given power.
If we're going to be looking for a demon subtype, I've always had Watcher traits; in real-world scenarios, I try not to give away too much information. I observe people to see if they can be trusted or not, and what is safe to say around them. It could be a self-preservation technique I learned when young, or it could be something else, but at this point, in my late twenties, I'm so far away from my initial experiences of interacting with other children that I can't say what is learned and what is innate. I do know that I was never popular. I also know that putting information out about myself on an online forum is not *as* safe as speaking with someone in-person (at least, considering that the idea that one can trust that person is a given).
It's said that you learn a lot more when you listen and stop talking, and to an extent, this is true. But if you never talk, you never direct conversation, and you may never get to talk about what *you* want to talk about.
At present...we're (by "we" I mean all the "I's") trying to work out what is going on with this system. If I were going to listen to my walk-in partner here, we actually have more than one spirit operating through this body, and a series of splits or aspects off of some of them.
There's the shapeshifting tangent...which I nearly forgot to mention. The shapeshifting has to do with one of my identities who has a couple of modifying adjuncts which can appear in concert with him, but which rarely if ever appear on their own. In my system he has had his own subsystem, however we can see that this organization is in some way not accurate.
I read Ges speaking...from a number of years ago...about how to his mind, a demon was a celestial (a construct) that no longer worked for its appointed purpose. This, at least, clarifies the "Satan" (rebellious construct) link to me. And the poor luck/troubled life thing that I read Kahoku mentioning elsewhere...for if you're a construct and you aren't doing what you were designed to do, this in effect could make someone (the one who constructed you) kind of upset.
As for whether
all the multiplicity is the work of one being, or we actually do have about four separate souls and different emanations of those souls...that's as yet unclear.
I've written enough...sorry for the tl;dr.
The latter part of this was written by A. The beginning was likely I.