Been thinking about shifting a lot lately, mental shifts.
I see myself as just an amalgam of every part of me. I never held with shifting much, because I felt like it implied I was becoming different people, or putting on a characterization. But I’m starting to notice and pick up on the subtle ways my mood will change that are in all likelihood, mental shifts. Beyond just feeling drastic surges of emotion like wanting to hunt or fly.
The physical aspect I’m used to – some days I would prefer to look differently, and which way I’d prefer to look can vary, sometimes randomly. (And recently this has extended to even little shit like my avatars on websites – when I’m shifted and the icons don’t match up, it feels “stale” until I change it.) Phantom limb shifts have always been intense for me in general, and this includes humanoid features like different faces. But the mental… it’s not that my whole personality shifts (I don’t understand that at all, really, outside of mental illness), but more like almost imperceptible changes in sensory intake and the output of attitude that follows. So subtle that it took my partners pointing it out, and me watching myself on social media to recognize it fully.
The way I type doesn’t change, but my tone does. The things I focus on in conversation and activities will change. My energy levels will change. My volume will change. The music I wanna listen to will change. All these things come together to make a complete and whole personality and probably aren’t very noticeable to anyone not close to me, but for whatever reason I can start to pin things down as being related to particular shifts more often than others. I’m beginning to wonder if online friends aren’t picking up on it too, on some level – certain shifts will last for weeks at a time, and I’m noticing that the way people interact with me during certain ones changes in a pattern. Suffice to say this one isn’t a huge hit.
I don’t see a lot of talk on the details of shifting, so I’d like to hear how other people experience these.
I’ve never liked to apply the concept of shifting to my fictionkin identity, either, really, because it implies, to me, that I’m not always Alice in some way? I don’t know. I only largely feel comfortable using it to describe my therianthropy, but that’s likely because I’ve always been in the therian community and that’s where I began and where I’m very comfortable, oftentimes.
But I do understand that there’s just not another word for it, and there is a sort of “shift” that happens with my fictotype. Sometimes I just feel….MORE Alice. I feel more like my other self in the present than just my current self. As if I’ve been taken from one time and put in another, though of course I still retain my identity and memories of here and am fairly grounded in them. But there are things between my lives that are very similar, so the feeling definitely happens. I’m not really sure how to describe it.
I certainly find myself feeling older, and like my body is bigger than it is. I tend to think more with regards to my Alice memories when I’m “shifted,” as well. And I notice my gender (which is already fluid) shifts further towards demigirl when I’m more Alice, since I was certainly a woman at the time, whenever and wherever that was.
I’ve written a post a short ways back on this blog that describes my experiences with wolf shifts, as well, if that’s of any interest to you.
Both of these describe mental shifts really well. When trying to explain m-shifts versus fronting, a lot of the subtleties are lost in the often-used car analogy. It’s that one aspect becomes more pronounced rather than showing up out of nowhere. Those parts of you are always there. You still like the same foods and the same music, but the preferences and cravings change rather than suddenly popping up only during a shift.
