I don't know why I keep trying. Every year is the same: first day, crowded hallway, noise that pierces through like needles into my bones. My classmates hug each other, shout over heads, laugh with an ease that feels completely foreign to me. I lean against the wall and watch. I always watch. It's the only thing I'm good at in these places: looking without being seen. Darío tells me I'm weird. He doesn't mean it badly, I think. It's just what he thinks. Sometimes I think it too. That something in me is off, like a speaker with the wrong frequency. Everyone catches the signal except me. Or maybe I catch a different signal they can't hear. Today during recess, I sat under the big tree in the yard and spent twenty minutes watching the wind move the branches. No one came to ask if I was okay. They didn't need to.
The dream again. It's always the same, with small variations, like someone is adjusting it little by little. I'm in a forest I don't know but recognize, if that makes any sense. The trees are enormous, the ground smells of damp earth and pine, and I'm running. Not on two legs. I run in a way that in the dream feels completely natural, with my body low, wind in my face, muscles working in a way I've never felt in real life. I'm not alone. There are others. I don't see them clearly, they're shadows moving parallel among the trees, but I feel them. I feel them like you feel the presence of someone you trust in a dark room. I woke up at four in the morning with my heart racing and a strange feeling in my shoulders, like I had just taken something off or put on something I was always meant to wear.
Today, Ms. Ruiz talked about animal behavior. She started with primates, the usual stuff, and then moved on to wolves. She showed a ten-minute documentary. I didn't blink. The rest of the class was on their phones or passing notes. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. There was a scene where the pack hunted in coordination, without talking, without visible signals, as if they shared a thought traveling through the air between them. The narrator said wolves communicate with their bodies, their eyes, their sense of smell. That in a pack, each individual knows exactly their place, and that's not a limitation but a liberation. I don't know why that hit me so hard. I wrote in my notebook: 'What if I belong to a kind of pack I haven't found yet?' Then I crossed it out three times, but the words were still there underneath.
Darío dragged me to Lucía's house. There were about forty people, music at a volume that made thinking impossible, and that smell of cheap perfumes and alcohol that turns my stomach. I stayed exactly forty-five minutes. Then I made up a headache and walked alone through the neighborhood for an hour. It was the best part of the day. The streets at night have a different texture. Fewer people, more silence, and that particular smell the asphalt has when the temperature drops. I stood still in the park for a while, without my phone in hand, just breathing. A dog looked at me from the other side of the path. We looked at each other for a long time. It didn't bark. I didn't do anything either. It was one of those conversations that don't need words. I got home, and my mom asked if I had a good time. I said yes. It wasn't entirely a lie.
I fell into a TikTok rabbit hole. I started watching a video of a wolf in the snow, and four hours later, I was still there. People upload incredible content: wolves in packs, lone wolves crossing mountains, howling at night captured with high-sensitivity microphones. There's a creator who films in Yellowstone, and his videos are hypnotic. In one, a gray wolf stops, lifts its head, sniffs the air, and then looks directly at the camera for about three seconds. Three seconds that I felt in my chest as if it were looking at me. I saved the video. I've watched it like eight times. In the comments, someone wrote: 'When your theriotype finds you on the internet.' I didn't know what it meant, but I saved that comment in my phone notes too. Something told me I'd need to look it up.
I searched for theriotype. Google gave me weird results at first, role-playing and fantasy stuff, but then I found a Reddit thread where people talked seriously. Not as if they were playing. As if they were describing something real happening inside them. A girl said that since she was little, she felt her body wasn't entirely hers, that something in her was more animal than human, and when she found the word therian, it was like someone had finally named something she'd been trying to describe for years without success. I read it three times. My heart did something strange. I don't know how to explain it. Like when you recognize a song you don't remember hearing before but know you know. I kept reading for two hours. I lost track of time. When I looked up, it was almost midnight, and it was raining outside.
I couldn't sleep. I opened my laptop and kept searching. I found forums, blogs, a couple of wikis, a YouTube channel by a girl who's been documenting her process for five years. She calls herself a wolf therian and speaks with a calmness that initially shocked me. No drama, no shame. She just explains her experience, like someone describing they like coffee or prefer afternoons to mornings. There's something in that normality that unsettled me more than anything scandalous. I also found the term therianthropy and its etymology: from the Greek therion, beast, and anthropos, human. Beast-human. I read that it doesn't imply physical transformation. That it's an internal, psychological, spiritual experience according to each person. That there are thousands of people who identify this way worldwide. Thousands. It's not a rarity. It's a community. I closed the laptop. I stayed in the dark for a while, thinking about that word: community.
Today I forced myself to read slowly. Without skipping. Without opening twenty tabs at once. I found a definition I copied into my notebook, by hand, because when I write by hand, things stick with me differently: Therians are people who identify, on a psychological, playful, or spiritual level, with a non-human animal. It doesn't imply physical transformation or the belief of having a different body, but an internal experience of identity. I read it out loud. Then in silence. Then I went back to the beginning and read it again. Internal experience of identity. That's exactly what I've never known how to explain when I try to tell someone I feel different. It's not that I want to be a wolf. It's that something in me already is. Does that make sense? Maybe not. But it's the closest I've ever been to feeling like something makes sense.
I spent the day with that knot in my stomach that I get when something matters too much, and I don't know what to do with it. In class, I didn't pay attention. In the cafeteria, I stared at my plate without eating much. Darío asked if I had fought with someone. I said no. The question that keeps spinning in my head is: what if this is just a phase? What if I just like the wolf aesthetic, the documentaries, nature, and I'm building an identity on top of a hobby? I read that this question is very common. That many people in the community have it. That there's no way to prove you're a therian, just like there's no way to prove what your inner life is like. Only you have access to that. That reassured me a bit. But it also scared me. Because it means no one can tell me if this is real. Only I can know. And I still don't know.
I was sitting on my bedroom floor, headphones on, listening to a recording of wolf howls I found on Spotify, and something happened that I don't know how to name. I started to feel a pressure at the base of my spine. It wasn't pain. It was more like presence. Like something should be there and wasn't. Therians call it a phantom shift. The sensation of limbs or body parts of the animal you identify with, even though they don't physically exist. Tail. Ears. Snout sometimes. I read about this, but I thought it was something that happened to others, not something that would happen to me. I stayed completely still. Breathed slowly. The sensation lasted about two minutes and then went away. I stared at the ceiling for a long time. I don't know if I was scared or relieved. I think both at the same time.
I found a Discord server. It's called The Pack and has a channel for introductions, a channel for questions, a channel for experiences, and a channel for animal memes, which turns out to be the most active. It took me four days to join. Today I did. I chose a name: Mateo_gray. Gray for the gray wolf, which is the one that appears in my dreams. I read the conversations in the introductions channel for an hour before writing anything. There are people from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile. There's a guy from Zaragoza who's sixteen like me. There are veteran members who've been in the community for years and answer new members' questions with incredible patience. Finally, I wrote: 'Hi. I'm new. I think I'm a wolf therian, but I'm still not sure about anything.' In less than five minutes, I had six responses. None laughed. None asked if I was crazy. They all said welcome.
I spent almost three hours talking to a guy on the server named Diego. He's sixteen and lives in Monterrey. He's a coyote therian and has known what he is for a while. He told me that at first, he also had the same spiral of doubts: whether it was a phase, whether he was making things up, whether something was wrong with him. He said that at some point, he stopped looking for proof and started just living with the experience, not fighting against it. 'You don't have to prove it to anyone,' he wrote. 'Not even to yourself all the time. It just is what it is.' I don't know why that struck me so much. Maybe because no one had ever told me something like that without it sounding like a cliché. I asked if he was afraid to tell people in his life. He took a moment to answer. Then he wrote: 'Depends on the day.'
Today I almost told Darío. We were alone in his room, he was playing FIFA, I was staring at the ceiling from the floor, and there was a long, comfortable silence where I felt I could have said it. I opened my mouth. Closed it again. What do I say exactly? 'Hey, I think I identify psychologically and spiritually with a wolf.' In my head, it sounds fine. Out loud, in Darío's room with the game noise in the background, it sounded like something I wouldn't know how to hold if he laughed or made that face of not knowing what to say. Not out of fear of him specifically. But because once I say it out loud, I can't unsay it. And I still don't know if I'm ready for it to be real in that way. Real outside. For now, it's still mine. And that's not bad.
My mom asked me this morning if I was okay. She asked in that way she does when she already knows something's up and just waits for me to confirm it. I said yes, that I was just thinking a lot. 'About what?' I didn't know what to say. 'Things.' She looked at me for a moment, then nodded and didn't press further. That's what I love most about her: she knows when not to insist. But I spent the whole day with that question swirling around. What am I thinking about? About who I am. About why I've always felt like someone watching life from outside the glass. About whether this thing I found, this word, this community, this experience, is an answer or just another question with better wrapping. About whether there's something in me that has always been there and just now learned its name.
My dad has a friend with a farm an hour from here, and sometimes we go on weekends. Tonight I went out alone after dinner. I walked to where the garden ends and the real field begins. There was no full moon, it was a new moon, and the sky was completely open and full of stars. I sat on the ground. The earth was cold and damp and smelled of everything the countryside smells like at night: grass, mud, something that has no name but I've always recognized. I stayed still for a long time. I didn't think about anything specific. I was just there. At some point, I closed my eyes and felt that thing in my spine again, the phantom shift, but softer than the first time. More natural. As if in that place, in that silence, something in me relaxed in a way it can't relax anywhere else.
I tried to tell Darío. This time I got further. We were walking through the park, and I told him I found something on the internet that made me think a lot about myself. He was interested. I told him there are communities of people who identify with animals, not as cosplay or role-playing but as something real, psychological. He listened. Then he asked: 'And you?' And there I stopped. I said I found it interesting as a concept. That I'd been reading about it. He said how curious and changed the subject. He didn't laugh. He didn't say anything bad. But he didn't engage either. And I didn't insist. We walked another twenty minutes talking about other things, and I carried inside me half of what I wanted to say. I don't regret trying. But I also don't regret keeping the other half to myself. It's not the time yet.
I went back to the server. I shared what happened with Darío, in more detail than in these pages. Diego replied right away. He said he went through something similar, that there are people who will never fully understand, and that doesn't mean the relationship isn't worth it. 'You don't need everyone to understand. You just need some people to.' Another guy on the server, Iker, said he hasn't told anyone in his real life either and has been like that for a year, and it's fine. That the online community is community too. That real doesn't only mean physical. I kept thinking about that. Sometimes I think what I have with these people I don't know in person is more honest than many face-to-face conversations I have. Because here I came without a history, without a role to fulfill, without the version of me that others already have fixed in their heads.
I've been researching the history of therianthropy. It's older than I thought. The oldest cave paintings in the world, in caves in France and Spain, already show half-human, half-animal figures. Shamans in many cultures believed in the ability to connect with the spirit of an animal. In Ancient Egypt, gods had animal heads. In Greek mythology, there was lycanthropy. It's not that modern therians come directly from all that, but something impresses me: the idea that humans have felt that connection to the animal for tens of thousands of years, representing it, naming it. As if it were something that doesn't disappear but changes shape according to the era. Maybe what I feel isn't new. Maybe it's very, very old and just now has the internet.
The dream was different tonight. Longer, clearer. I was running with the pack, but this time I saw them. They weren't transformed people. They were wolves. But I knew, with that absolute logic dreams have, that they were also people. That there was something in them that was like me, or something in me that was like them. No one spoke. We moved through a snowy forest, following a trail I couldn't see but the others could, and at some point, I realized I felt it too. The trail. In the scent. I woke up with my hands clenched into fists and a feeling in my chest that wasn't fear but something like what I imagine pride is, if pride were silent and needed no one to exist. I stayed awake for a long time. Outside, dawn was breaking. A bird started to sing. I listened until it finished.
I don't have answers. I want to make that clear here, in case I read this someday and feel embarrassed for having written it: I don't know for sure what I am. I don't know if what I feel has a name that fits me completely or if that name is just the closest I've found so far. I don't know if I'll ever tell my mom, Darío, or someone in flesh and blood who looks me in the eyes while I say it. I don't know if the phantom shifts will keep happening or if the dream will return tonight. What I do know is this: for sixteen years, I felt like something misaligned, like a signal on the wrong frequency. And then I found a word, a community, and something in me that had been silent for a long time lifted its head. I don't know where this is going. But for the first time in a long time, I'm not afraid to keep walking to find out.
Diego sent me a link. A park in Antequera, Málaga, called Lobo Park. It's been working with wolves for decades, has packs, offers guided tours, and once a month, on a full moon, they organize something called Howl Nights. Two and a half hours at dusk when the wolves become active, when the cold starts to set in, and they begin to really move. When the air starts to cool, and the sun begins to set, the wolves get lively. It's the best time to hear them howl. It says so on their website. I read it four times. Then I closed the laptop, opened it again, and read it again. There's something in that phrase that ties a knot in my throat that I don't know if it's excitement or fear or both mixed. Diego says he went to something similar in the mountains of Monterrey and hasn't forgotten it. That there are moments you can't prepare for.
I asked my mom if we could go to Málaga on the next vacation. She asked why Málaga. I showed her the park's website, the part about wolves in semi-freedom, the research, the educational programs. I didn't tell her the other part. I didn't need to. My mom looked at the screen for a moment and then said: 'It looks interesting.' That in her language means yes. I told her about the Howl Nights. That they were on a full moon, lasted two and a half hours, that the wolves could be heard from afar when they started. She looked at me in that way she does when she feels something matters to me without fully understanding why. And said: 'Let's check dates.' I went to my room and sat on the floor for a long time doing nothing. Just with that. With the possibility of it happening.
Three hours of driving. My dad drives, my mom reads, I sit in the back with headphones on but no music. Just watching the landscape change through the window. We leave the city and its gray edges behind, and then comes that moment where the highway crosses a vast plain, and the sky becomes wider than anywhere else. I kept looking at the distant mountains. Rocky, dry, with that late afternoon light that turns everything orange and shadow. I thought about what I'm going to see tonight. If the wolves will howl. If I'll be able to stay still or if something in me will want to respond. I mentioned it on the server before leaving home. Iker wrote: 'If you howl, howl. It's okay.' Luna put a full moon emoji and nothing else. Sometimes words aren't needed.
The park is seven kilometers south of Antequera, past the Torcal mountains. We arrived during the day to take the guided tour before nightfall. The guide's name is Rodrigo, he's about thirty, and he talks about the wolves with the calmness of someone who has known them for a long time and no longer needs to impress anyone. He took us through the enclosures. The packs live in large spaces, with vegetation, with water. It's not a zoo. It's something else. The wolves aren't standing still posing. They move, sniff each other, mark their territory, ignore or watch each other according to their own rules that have nothing to do with us. One, the largest, stopped about ten meters away and looked directly at us. Not with aggression. With something I don't know how to name. Evaluation, perhaps. I held the gaze as long as I could. Rodrigo said in a low voice: 'That's the alpha. If he doesn't look away, it's a good sign.' He didn't look away.
They gave us a welcome drink on the terrace while we waited for the sun to set. From there, you can see the entire Torcal mountain range, that limestone formation that looks like it's from another planet. The air started to cool suddenly when the sun touched the horizon, that transition you don't notice as much in the city but here is physical, tangible, like someone changing a parameter of the world. There were about twenty of us. Most spoke quietly among themselves. I didn't talk to anyone. I leaned on the railing, watching the enclosures that from here were shadows moving among trees. Rodrigo said: 'When the air cools, they wake up. Listen.' There was a long silence. And then, from somewhere in the park I couldn't see, came the first sound.
It's not like in the documentaries. Documentaries capture the sound but not the volume, not the way it enters through the chest and resonates somewhere that's not exactly the ear. The first howl was a single one, sharp, long, and before it ended, three others joined in from different points in the park. The people around me made that sound people make when something surprises them. I didn't do anything. I stayed completely still with my eyes closed, and something in me that I don't know how to call went tense, like a string tightening before it vibrates. Rodrigo said we could try to respond. That sometimes it worked. Most laughed a little, nervously, and someone attempted a timid howl. I took a deep breath. And howled. Not a test howl. A real one, from deep down, from that place where I keep the things I don't say. There was a second of silence. And then the wolves responded.
It's twelve thirty at night. My parents are silent in the front. The road is empty. I'm in the back looking at the stars through the window, and my throat is a bit scratchy from howling, and I don't care at all. I sent a message to Diego: 'It was exactly like you said.' He replied in two minutes: 'Did they respond?' I said yes. He took a moment. Then he wrote: 'You already knew.' I don't know what I knew exactly. I know that tonight I did something I'd never done before: I was in a place where what I am, or what I feel I am, wasn't strange or needed explanation. The wolves don't know anything about identities or internet communities. They just responded to a sound. And that sound was mine. My mom turned from the front seat and asked me quietly if it had been good. I said yes. This time it wasn't a lie at all.
