A Fundamentally Different Experience
Lately I’ve been feeling a disconnect between my experiences, and the term ‘fictionkin’. What was once a concise and specific term no longer carries the nuance of my identity.It leaves me groundless, floundering around trying to describe myself to anyone in a meaningful way.
I’ve been coming to terms with the unavoidable fact that the definition of fictionkin is… expanding. That it is inclusive of people who are in no way spiritual- who don’t believe in souls, or other worlds, or reincarnation; who chose to identify as characters as a coping mechanism or for some other reason.
I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this felt like an intrusion. It feels like an intrusion.
I can share. I can happily make space at the fictionkin table for experiences that are not like my own experiences.
But the purpose of a label is to identify, and if the definition of the label has expanded, then you need clarifying labels beneath it. Its all well and good to say you’re cooking beans, but what kind of beans? Green beans? Baked beans? Jumping beans?
I understand that for some people, fictionkin is something that happens in their head, but that is not my experience, and when I say that I’m fictionkin, that is not what I want people to assume. I don’t want people within my own community, and the larger fictionkin and otherkin community to think that I decided I was Ken Ichijouji because I felt like him, or because I needed to draw on his strength to handle some emotional problem.
That’s not my experience.
My soul is the same soul that belonged to a man in another world named Ichijouji Ken. It belonged to another name, in another world before that. But the one I remember most strongly is that.
I was a detective. A husband. A smoker. I wore shirts at the beach and thought my feet were too big. I was a scared little boy, and a powermad, arrogant teenager. I was born in 1987, in the Koto area of Japan, Tokyo. I died in an elevator, in 2031.
I died, and my soul moved. My soul slipped through the cracks between universes, and in an infinite number of possibilities, my soul was born here. In Los Angeles, in 1986.
My soul shifted from one universe to another, but I have one complete, continuous existence across life times. I have memories and feelings and motivations left over from that life, the same as I have memories, feelings and motivations left over from when I was six years old. I suffer memories and flashbacks, and guilt, and longing, and nightmares.
It was a real stage in my existence, that continues to affect me, despite having grown and changed and moved on.
That is what I believe. That is my experience. And I want people when I tell them what I am, to know that that’s my experience.
To that end, I’m going to be using a new word, in addition to fictionkin. Soulshifted.
I am a soulshifted fictionkin.
That is my experience.
