When working with resources of this kind it is important to know where your information is coming from.  My take on therianthropy may differ considerably from yours.  Therefore, I offer you this piece as posted to the Livejournal community RLTherianthropy (http://www.livejournal.com/community/rltherianthopy).  It explains my beginnings in therianthropy as well as the feelings I associate with it.  As if this wasn't enough, I am sure you will find out more about my personal therianthropy through my other pieces on this site.

I've been on the community for a while now, but this is the first chance I've had to write an account of my personal therianthropy for those interested...

I think this tale begins in the usual way.  When I was a kid, earliest I remember being age 3, I always felt more at ease with animals than with people.  Everything about them seemed to me more "natural" as it were than my own human ways - from the shapes of their bodies and how they moved, to how they behaved.  Like a lot of children I used to play as an animal constantly, a dog, wolf or fox usually.  While in my preschool it was supposed to be the rotten role to get when playing house to be the animal (everyone wanted mummy or daddy or something) I took my role as dog, a german shepherd dog, very seriously :P It was more natural to me than playing as a person.  From early primary school (that's age 4-11 here) I considered myself an animal inside.  I didn't really identify what then, I just knew that was the case, and I accepted it.

I had a fixation with foxes and wolves for a while during those years, up until about age 10 when other things took my interest, and I didn't really take an interest in animals other than liking them and having them as companions.  I still felt I related better to them than to other people, and preferred their company, although I do feel that might have been because I was generally socially incapable! Around this time my parents had granted me more freedom one way or another (I won't go into the problems they had at the time) and I took this time to take the family dog and go out into the woods and hills around the village, where when I was completely alone, I would often just "be" an animal, and do the things I wanted but would not have dared do around anyone else.  There were also things I experienced but didn't want to ask anyone else about, the feeling that I had a tail, and other assorted weird ways my body sometimes felt - more animal than human.  I can now label these phantom shifts.

Through my early and mid teens I had no real interest in animals other than caring for my pets, I was interested in music and nothing else.  Still, I had the phantom shifts, and occasionally I would feel myself in a mindset which I believed was animal.  Not entirely animal, because I still was in control and knew that there was something different and not entirely normal about the way I was perceiving in this mindset.

When I was 16 I began to learn more about spotted hyenas, because of some stuff I had read about them in a wildlife magazine.  At that point I knew immediately that I had a real connection with them and identified with them, but I didn't connect that further to how I felt inside.  I just knew that they were an animal extremely close to me.

Finally, when I was 17 and had been living with my boyfriend for a while, I one day asked him if he ever felt the way I did, and whether he ever felt the phantom shifts and so on.  It was the first time I'd mentioned this to anyone, and I wanted to know whether it was something normal and a fluke of the mind, or whether I was indeed alone in experiencing this.  He replied that he had never experienced any of what I described.  It was then that I theorised (this as a total sceptic and agnostic) that there had to be some explanation for this, and that maybe it was that I had been an animal in a past life.  It was the best I had, so I set about looking up reincarnation online, and joined a forum where I asked and watched for other people who felt the same.  There was no one.  They were all humans in past lives, and a few didn't believe animals had souls anyway.

So, this fruitless path continued.  And then my discovery of therianthropy in a most unlikely way.  I was involved in dog rescue and found out that one of the members of the community was a "real life vampire".  I thought this hilarious, and when having a laugh with someone else about it online, I decided to Google for real life werewolves.  You know, shapechanging and howling at the moon.  Something to have a snigger at.  At first I found a page on "how to p-shift" (with your back against a wall and thinking very hard or something) and this provided much amusement.  My second discovery was a page on real therianthropy, and the laughs stopped there.  I was stunned as I read down the page (http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/1927/greenspiral/resource.html ) because it just described almost everything I'd been searching for an anwer for to a T.  So there were others in the same position as me, and I had something of an explanation.  I was a Therianthrope.

The most important thing to me was that I wasn't alone in how I felt.  I took time, did more research, and found that all of the serious sites at any rate were of a good match to me.  Using some of the good advice I found on various sites, I was able to soul search and fit together the pieces of the puzzle and recognise that my phenotype seemed to be spotted hyena.  There were loads of other considerations, from my more favoured wolf and fox and mustelids, but nothing fit as well as spotted hyena.  It drew me back over and over and I now consider it as my phenotype.  That may be right or wrong but it is the best answer I can provide myself.

I've spoken little in the community since discovering it.  I've made some friends, attended some meets, but mainly I know what I am.  I do not have an explanation for therianthropy, and though we might ponder it, I doubt any of us will ever know.  But knowing what I am and where I fit into the scheme of things is enough for me.