Where'd you first hear of the community?

I first learned about vampires waaay back, like when I was in middle school. I don't think I immediately understood it, but I was like, 'huh, so that's a thing, cool' and forgot about it until about a year later when I began looking into the vampire community again and realized I myself am one. I remember the website I used linked to affiliated websites and that's probably where I learned about otherkin and therians as well.

In 2020, I was hospitalized for depression, and was talking to other people in the ward. One of these people was a girl in an OSDD system or something similar. She never actually named her situation, but the way she described her headmates (she called them "voices" and said she was getting "treatment for it"), struck a chord with me, as I realized suddenly that what I had thought of as "intrusive thoughts" were most often actually closer to this girl's experience of plurality. I told the doctor about it and they were dismissive, saying "we usually only worry when the voice is outside your head." I didn't bring it up again, but I met other plurals before I got out and afterwards, realized one of my peers was in a system after they told me. I would later meet other plurals online. (The "intrusive thoughts" voice had been around since around freshman year of high school, but this was my first step in realizing that they're autonomous. Recently, the "voice" named imself Monger. Monger uses e/im/is pronouns. The rest of us have decided not to communicate with Monger, though, because is main hobby is oppositional confrontation and it annoys the rest of us).

Also in 2020, I was still using social media at that time and was in a Discord group where some people started talking about characters that they relate to and were using the word "kin" as a verb. I was confused and asked if the term was related to otherkinity and one of the people who was not speaking about their experiences this way sent me a DM asking if we could talk. They asked me what I knew, I told them that I knew very little but respected it. They confided in me that they were alterhuman, and the reason they were uncomfortable during the earlier conversation was because of that. Over the course of my time in that server, I realized a lot about myself, including that I am alterhuman in many ways and that the "voice" I discovered in the hospital was really one of my many headmates. I later came out to one other member of the server (who was already openly in a system), who proceeded to realize their alterhumanity as well.

And then one day I tried coming out to the whole server. This prompted the other two people on the server to come out as well, but things did not go well as planned and most of the server (which was pretty small) sided against us. The owner of the server and two other people were the only ones to side with us. However, despite the attempts by the server owner to keep everything from falling apart, it did. A while later, partially because of the tensions caused by the server and partially due to other events, the friendship between all of us shattered, and the only one of us who was still a mutual friend with all the others was the former server owner.

Two of those people, the one I initially came out to and their boyfriend, reached out to me again shortly before I quit social media, but I lost contact with all of them when I quit, which I chose to do because I was on a wholly different server and they started to suspect that my discomfort around certain topics was a problem, so they forcefully outed me and then banned me for it as if I was the one causing problems.

Recently, I've been trying to foster a more healthy relationship between myself, my headmates, and our shared alterhumanity.