On Octopi
or: "Should I Interrogate Aspects of my Identity Further?" and Why The Answer is No.

I wonder if its worth it to dive deeper into my love for cephalopods. I've loved them a lot for a while now. I remember rereading a NatGeo article for them when I was maybe 13 and just becoming obsessed with them. Believe it or not, they're the reason I'm a gillman. Dreaming about octopus aliens was the thing that pushed me out of draconity and into fishhood about nine years ago. My Octopus Teacher, The Mountain Under The Sea, Remarkably Bright Creatures.... all things that I have adored over the years.

It's very safe to say that they have impacted me deeply, but I don't know how to articulate that. It's not something separate from being a gillman, they are apart of my overall identity. When I say I am a gillman, I mean I am a cephalopod, an eel, a gar, an alligator, a sturgeon... I am all of these things and probably more shoved into a human body and told to walk on legs. Just like how the Ichthyostega was put onto its legs in the late Devonian, I, too, rise out of the swamp and find joy on land. I am a transitional fossil between the human and the aquatic. I exist in the space between a world so foreign, so inaccessible to me, and the human world.

And within this trail mix bag of an identity, there is the local environment. My swamps, my wetlands, the fish that keep the local economy alive and that I grew up catching and eating. You can't separate my gillmanhood from my adoration for the culture and ecosystems of my home. The Ichthyostega was from Greenland, but I am here, in the American South. The form I take and the way I connect with the world around me is directly tied to where I grew up. Unlike many nonhumans, my "habitat" would have always been near my childhood. Of course, not everything here is swampland, but the cypress trees grow wherever there is water, be it creek or flooded lawn, and that's where you'll find me. Near them and in the mud. Had I grown up in the mountains, my nonhumanity would have manifested completely differently.

And then my inner world, which I have an interesting relationship with. I call it a world building project but its more like... building a world for me. I share it with others and they see it as my original characters and while they aren't wrong, those who have watched it grow know that it is like a memoir to me. It's how I process my life, the world around me. How I make sense of the things that happen and explorations of my urges and desires that really drive my nonhumanity. I am them, they are me. They don't make up my whole identity, there are other things I experience that they don't and things that they do that I have no intimate connection to. But their bodies and their world is one that I would be more comfortable in. They were created from the previously mentioned alien octopi dream and have gone on to become a manifestation (or perhaps even a love letter) to the things that I believe to make me nonhuman.

So, is it worth it to dive deeper into my love for cephalopods? They are such a small part of this large, complex identity that intertwines with my whole life. They aren't an identity on their own, but its clear that they are an integral part of why I am the way I am today. Even if we take into account my adoration for fish monsters as a child and the playful onset of phantom webbed hands from games of play-pretend, it is the octopus that completely rewrote the way I see myself. I think that deserves interrogating and paying more attention to. But outside of consuming more octopi media, I am unsure how to do that. I can connect with gillmanhood as a whole through food, movement, sounds, and clothing. Alienness is achieved by being a gillman and thriving in the in-betweens. Nothing I do or have ever done evokes feelings around my connection to cephalopods, despite their deep importance to me. Even gargoyles, whose status as a hearttype allows for me to have a more loose definition on what my connection exactly is and how it impacts me, have their own genre of actions that I can take in order to feel closer to them.

I have begun, recently, to break my identity down into smaller parts. In an attempt to talk about how I see myself recently, I've had to rip myself open and inspect all the smaller aspects. Pencorpus has been great in doing that for me, but it's also created its own issues. I can easily point to every part of being a jersey devil because it feels so disjoined and so incomplete. It's hollow, but still present. That makes it easy to define and articulate. It has a clear beginning and end. The issue is that I am now more aware of all the much smaller intricacies that make up my full gillman identity even though it is nigh impossible, due to its complexity. It's not very fun, I am not a fan of micro labels but I see myself stepping closer and closer to creating dozens of my own just to make myself easier to define for discussions sake.

By nature (or perhaps trade, who knows), I need to be able to easily define all my terms plainly and clearly before I even begin analyzing them. This applies to everything, especially my own emotions. If I can not lay my argument down and have it be clear and cohesive and easy to understand, then I need to keep it in the drafts and keep working away at it. Clearly, that is an issue when it comes to introspection. There is no way for me to know my whole self, understand my whole self, and then discuss and analyze my whole self at any given moment. I change often and greatly, and I will never be able to encompass that. No label I make will be able to define what being a gillman is and what it entails. And it annoys me! I know I can't rely on my current modes of thinking when it comes to personal reflection, and I must let go of this idea that I need to be all knowing about my experiences and emotions in order to talk about them.

So... Do I lean more into cephalopods? I don't know. I wont right now, at least. Despite their importance to who I am, I am not coming at this with a genuine desire to be closer to that part of me. I am coming at this from a desire to label and categorize things, and that is not conducive to what my goal is. I have written like this in the past, and always thrown it out because of how unorganized they always are. No thesis, no real evidence, my paragraphs are shorter than they should be and my syntax is appalling. There's an academic structure, sure, but it's all from that place of needing to overexplain and overcompensate. If I can't argue perfectly, it's not an argument worth making. If I can't understand myself perfectly, it's not worth it to try and be understood. I am going to post this anyway because I think it'll be good for me. A sort of exposure therapy in being able to let emotions be less than perfect. It's unedited, I haven't checked for errors, and it's a bit everywhere. Hopefully it works, and hopefully I can put out some better written, more meaningful things soon.

Godbwye.