For me, my therianthropy has been a part of my life from as far back as my youth. My younger years were always spent "pretending" to be a dog with my friends and trusted ones. Every breaktime was spent on all fours, engaging in playfights, barking and growling, and these times were amongst the most genuine and freeing in my life. I wished I could take the form of a canine, and how much happier I would be. But, even though I couldn't, I was still happy just being able to indulge in this part of myself with my loved ones.

Of course, during this time, I had no idea it could be something spiritual, something with a name that I shared with others, or even specifically what kind of canine I was (I often played the role of a wolf just because it was cool, lol). That would be something I would discover many years later. All I knew was that it was integral to who I was, and something I couldn't easily hide away.

In spite of this, it ended up taking a back seat for most of my teenage life, when the ambigious sense of shame was starting to set in and I was trying harder to not stand out, especially since it was the first time in years I'd been spending so long without people I trusted. Though I would eventually find a group of wonderful and supportive friends, I never really let them in that much on my spiritual inner world. It simply was something I didn't feel confident opening up to about to people who did not already understand. I would seek out other forms of spiritual self-connection, which did in turn come with animalistic aspects that I believe were a subconscious connection with my therian identity. But with my connection to my inner animal being pushed to the side and fading, it would be some time until I truly reconnected with that part of myself.

Jump forward to adulthood. I had a new relationship with my current partner, and after enough time for me to get comfortable with the relationship, I began yearning to express the more taboo parts of my identity. This is when I re-entered a foray with kink, something I had explored in my teen years, but had never truly felt stable and completely safe in. Now as an adult, in a stable and loving relationship, I wanted to try again to get some good out of kink experiences, even if long-distance. And so, we began experimenting with pup-play, and it was through this I rediscovered the euphoria of a canine identity.

I took to exploring this more in my own time, recalling the joy of caninehood from my childhood, and after some soulsearching came to the conclusion that I was a dog. Perhaps not physically, but on the inside, this was inseperable from who I was as a person. It took some time after this to determine exactly what kind of dog I was, but from the beginning I was certain that I was one of the larger dog breeds. I have nothing against smaller dogs, but the idea of being one myself was just completely incongruent. So, this narrowed things down a lot. For some time I defined myself simply as "a large dog," looking through images of different dog breeds to feel what I felt the most connected to. At some point I was trying out the label of "Poodle," and the connection I felt with that identity never faded or felt incorrect, and it was at this point that I knew I had found it. I was a Poodle, fur dark brown and fluffy all over. This was me.

Now, my humanity is rarely something that is in contest with my therian identity. The way I see it, I am a Poodle that has been blessed with a life in a human body. This means I can enjoy things that I would not have the same relationship to in my dog body; I can engage with and reflect on music and movies, connect with people all over the world, learn and take joy in skills (like building this website!), and eat chocolate!!! I get the best of both worlds; All the benefits of being human, while still indulging in all my dog behaviours with the people who are kind enough to celebrate this part of me.

Additionally, I don't see my kink identity and my therian identity as mutually exclusive parts either. Everything that makes me who I am is entangled with all the other parts. Like I mentioned earlier, I was able to reconnect with my therianthropy through kink. And I think the journey of discovering this inner part of yourself, connecting with your most primal desires and giving yourself the space to experience it, be genuinely yourself with others who feel the same, is an experience that both of these communities have. I think that if we are able to free ourselves of our fear of the unknown and open ourselves up to hearing each others experiences, we will only have things of value to learn and share with each other. For me, kink is a way to delve even deeper into vulnerablity and exploring all the parts of myself that I have to spend the rest of my life hiding, and through that, it can intensify my connection with my inner self. They exist to complement each other, not in spite of each other.