Sharing my personal experience as a therian (yaptime)

Just wanted to talk a bit about my experience with therianthropy, my awakening, and with being a therian in general, since I don't know what else to write about.

So the first time I ever heard about therians was from my ex, at the time dating, who told me and our friend group they were a red panda. Me and everyone included told them they were delusional, that they were not a red panda and that it's physically and genetically impossible for someone to be an animal. My ex failed to explain to me that it's not entirely physical. While I do know physical therians exist now, I assume you don't think you're biologically, anatomically and genetically an animal, right? Because that's what I thought my ex believed when they told me about therianthropy. It led to a lot of fights that I now regret, and it was one of the reasons we broke up (along with others).

An year later or so I was ranting on Discord how sometimes phantom shifts bother me, and someone pointed out that's not normal. I assumed that was normal as I felt these shifts since I was little and thought most people also felt phantom shifts occasionally, but when told it wasn't normal I looked up on Google "phantom ears" and found people on reddit talking about it but couldn't find any scientific source even mentioning it much less explaining. Seeing these people felt the same way as me I decided to approach therianthropy with a more open mind, and researched about it. I found out I relate with it, as besides the phantom shifts, those shifts always seemed from a specific creature that I was sure existed but couldn't remember the name, as I can visualize my tail and ears in my mind when having a shift. Taking that into account, my own instincts, what type of habitat and weather I'm the most comfortable in, the common genet was the animal I found the most relatable, as from every animal I know it's the only one who lives in more temperate climates, and I'm very avoidant of warm weather in general. The main reason for discarding wild cats was because of the tail, I have a very long, clearly black and white ringed tail and don't know any cat species who fit that description.

I had to take a lot of time to reflect on this, understand my feelings, my mentality and reconcile it with the fact that I'm Catholic. I believe my therianthropy is psychological, probably due neurodivergency as I'm autistic, and on this awakening process I was almost abandoning the faith completely, trying to turn to philosophies and religions like Taoism and paganism. They never felt complete to me, and thanks to very personal experiences and reflection I came more devout than I was before. Now I believe God knew what He was doing, that therianthropy exists as a way of expressing devotion, by being intimately tied to His creation to a point most people can't, it's not a mistake nor a sin. 

I learned about my other theriotypes later, by feeling shifts as them consistently and for long enough. While knowing about my falcon kintype was rather easy, being a sinosauropteryx is a bit more tricky as we don't know what dinosaurs really looked like. Sinosauropteryx is one of the few we do know how they looked like, what color they were, but we don't know their behavior and there might've been similar looking dinosaurs that could also be my kintype, so I admit I could be wrong about this last one. 

I've had mostly good experiences with the therian community, I'd say I know pretty much everyone in my city who is a therian, as it is a small city, we're like 6 therians in total lol, and they're very cool and interesting people, and it would be awesome if I could invite some of them here :3

I don't interact with the community on the internet, as I'm not someone who feels comfortable posting online, but I'm trying doing it on spacehey as it's a lot more anonymous and doesn't have an algorithm like other social media, I feel truly safe here.