The Last Word On Nothing

When I was a kid, I pretended I was a bird, and I did it in front of anyone in early elementary school, winging around with my arms outstretched. Around fourth grade I started learning modesty and only soared when no one was watching. The ground, I imagined, was far away, ants the size of people, and above it I made languid turns, sensing the change of air on my outspread fingers. On the younger side, before the modestly, I would flap and land on rocks or at the bottom of a tree, and I remember building a nest out of twigs, scratching away the dirt, and a girl in my class came and started flying with me and we shared the nest, taking turns sitting on our eggs, flying back to spell one another. 

A friend living in Argentina sent an article about Gen Z furries in the capital Buenos Aires, pictures of pubescent juveniles wearing masks and tails, leaping about in a park, hiding out in trees. How strange and beautiful, I thought. How familiar.

Could it be something is wrong with us? Zoanthropy is a rare clinical condition where a person takes on the traits of an animal, coming to believe they are, in fact, that animal. The most recent documentation, published in 2020, involves a 54-year-old Belgium woman who thought she was a chicken. She reported having barely slept for five days before this occurrence, and she was found wandering the streets barefoot in a dressing gown in the middle of the night. Soon she noted a strange sensation in her limbs, claiming they no longer fit her body, and she began flapping uncontrollably. Her brother found her in the garden doing exactly that and brought her in for evaluation. She had become a chicken, clucking and crowing, red in the face, flapping her arms, a more or less clean psychiatric record until then, a stable career as a pharmacy technician, married for twenty years. The episode culminated in a seizure in the hospital, after which she fell into a deep sleep for several hours and woke having no memory of being a chicken, all symptoms gone. 

I don’t think that’s what I was doing as a kid. I don’t think it’s what people are doing when they’re furries, nor is zoanthropy a trend reported by the New York Times last year in an article entitled, “Why Some Young People in China Pretend to Be Birds.” Videos of kids in China as birds sitting on their perches are worth watching.

We are all on an animal spectrum of some sort, but this desire to be one, for myself, is to become more than I am. There are days I’m tired of being human, pigeon-holed you might say. You must have felt it yourself, looking up to see a heron in flight, or an eagle with wings outstretched, and your arms tug a little.

Photo of my dear friend and artist Jeremy Collins, author of the incredible, artful splash of a book fresh out this year from Mountaineers Books, “Eventually a Sequoia: Stories of Art, Adventure & the Wisdom of Giants.”