Transspecieality

by Chatoyance

Two

TWO

With puberty came the ultimate horror of the realization that I was not somehow, magically, going to develop hooves and turn into a mare. The utter degradation of my human body failing to change through the sheer power of wishing slammed my concept of self, and filled me with bitter shame for my biped deformity. Nothing was worse than any revelation of the existence of my accursed humanity, be it at a swimming pool where I could not pony-paddle to save my life, or the ultimate hell of gym class. Of course my exemplary, honor student grades plummeted, as I failed all of my Physical Education classes, then many others as well. I simply could not bear to shower, or even to be in a place where my body would be an issue, and human sports in general were anathema to me.

I soon lost interest in school altogether, not just because of my boredom at the general illiteracy and ignorance of my peer students, but also because of the teachers – whom I felt often forced to correct for the most obvious of errors. I began to simply hid my texts of biochemistry (my passion in late grade school) and science fiction (my other, greater, lifelong passion) inside the dull and backward class volumes of Introduction To Whatever. I lived in the twin worlds of science and science fiction (and the odd translated Daring-Doo novel from Equestria), for they were my only salvation at the time.

The inevitability of my body remaining human shook my soul and my sanity. Suddenly my life was a living hell, not only from the exterior, but now from within as well. It was all I could do simply to survive one day to the next. Puberty confirmed that I was not going to magically transform, which was awful in itself, but it also brought terrible changes to my skin in the curse of acne.

My body could not abide human hormones. They robbed me of thought, altered my personality, bent me in twisted ways, and rode me like a demonic spirit. Human puberty crushed me in unending depression and sweaty, frustrated anguish. It also stole from me the remaining delicate and almost pony-like beauty of my childhood, buried underneath a loathsome shell of ropy pus-filled blisters. My acne problem was horrendous, with inch wide pustules covering the entirety of my face and back in overlapping repulsion. I began to walk constantly with my face down, hunched over, so none could see my countenance. It was as much because of becoming unalterably human in appearance, or so I imagined, as it was for the solid mass of pus-filled sacks that cursed my face.

Such truly horrible acne led to my parents to take me to medical help, to seek some way to cure it. In this circumstance, I made the most pathetic error of my adolescent life. At the time, the discovery that acne is not caused by chocolate or grease, but by a genetic predisposition, which results in tiny pores, was still fairly new. Under the influence of sex hormones, the dermal glands produce copious amounts of oil. This oil is too viscous and rapidly produced to escape the small pores, and backs up, forming easily infected sacs. This is the basis of truly severe acne. My body could not tolerate, and seemed particularly antagonistic to, human hormones, and thus I was provided an experimental option of taking dilute ponification serum to improve my self-destructing skin. It had only recently been discovered that the same serum that aided Ponification could be used in a highly diluted form to improve the human body in numerous ways. I was more than willing to be a test case!

I was enrolled in the experiment at the age of 14. Diluted ponification serum had an immediate and amazing effect upon me. My acne vanished within a week and a half, leaving smooth, clear skin. I marveled at the joy of being able to touch my own forehead, now flat and smooth and entirely unlike bubble-wrap anymore. I was also filled with an airy lightness, a euphoric feeling that made every day a joy. The dark clouds of perpetual depression that were my normality lifted, and for the first time since my early childhood, I knew contentment and happiness. Unfortunately, this was not to last.

One day I noticed that my middle fingernails, and middle toes had grown astonishingly thick. The bones of my hands had begun to lengthen, while my wrists gained an ability to bend further, and also with greater, leg-like strength. I loved this, and felt like my nightly prayer to become a pony was being answered. I understood that the serum was probably responsible, though I was not entirely clear on the process at that age. Perhaps I would turn into a filly one night, and it would all be alright!

However, one afternoon, I found a hard, small lump poking up near my left hip, on my belly. There was no corresponding lump on my right. I had no idea of the true meaning of this, and I leapt to the conclusion that it must be a tumor or a cancer! I became frightened. And that is when I made my terrible error. I told my mother. That was the end of my ponification serum experiment. The doctors knew what I did not - that this was normal breast development for an Equestrian. First a small hard core, which would have in time turned into a rubbery, expanding doughnut, only to melt away into the mature pony udder located lower on the barrel than in a human. My left udder had just started first. If only I had remained silent!

Of course the acne immediately came back, and so did the emotional and psychochemical nightmare world created by the dark god of human puberty. My magical, Equestrian world of light and contentment died, beneath the pounding, sweating, oily body of a human.

By high school, I had begun to learn how to avoid some of the constant abuse I suffered. No longer were groups of disturbed boys trying to flush my head down the toilet (as happened in Yermo, California) or taking turns kicking me in the stomach to get me to stand up and fight like a human, or holding me down and urinating on me for being a disgusting ‘pony faggot’ (as happened in Eugene, Oregon). Doubtless this was partly due to the general effect of growing older, but also I had begun a campaign of careful selective adaptation. I studied humans. I drew how they walked and moved, I practiced their actions and tried to mimic them. I increasingly suppressed my natural behavior in favor of an affected one that attempted to match those of the species I was perceived as. It was horrible, but at least it was less fraught with violence.

At this time in my life the driving effects of wearing a human body became the most damaging to my psyche. I was constantly obsessed with human drives - greed, selfishness, violence, sex, territoriality and power. They ruled my mind, my art, and my consciousness. I could barely think of anything else. It was inevitable that such primate drives would spill over into my species issues. Shortly after puberty, my love of wearing pony fursuits began to become tainted with sexual association. By high school this connection was ferocious. The disgust I felt at having my need to express my identity through wearing a fursuit became blended with this human hormonal alien that possessed my soul made the last sheds of my dignity, self worth, and hope dissolve. My mind could not cope with this last insult. The strange split in my mind, formed in my fillyhood, became profound, reaching its peak by my college days.

In effect, I had gradually developed two distinct selves, not unlike having two separate memory ‘files’. One memory ‘file was my day-to-day persona, which was utterly oblivious to my transspecies issues. This version of my self was fairly narrow, rigid in attitude, but capable of a minimal level of survival in the world. For me, the sensation of this mode of being is very easy to define. It was like sitting in the back row of a vast private movie theater, watching helplessly as my life was performed by someone else, whose sad misadventures I cringed at, on that tiny screen so far away. It was living death, it was numbness and isolation from my own experience of the world.

My other mode of being, my other ‘memory file’ became dominant only when I was alone and safe, parents gone or distant, sure of privacy. In those moments some change occurred, and the full knowledge of my ponysona flooded back. For brief minutes, or at best an hour or two, I rushed to address my transspecies suffering like a mare possessed. Because that accursed sex drive ruled me even then, my scramble to fursuit up and be myself was heavily tainted by masturbatory excess. When discovery became immanent, an equal scramble to purge and erase occurred, leaving me utterly unaware of what I had been doing just minutes before. This ‘lost time’ never bothered me, for my day-to-day modality was so constructed as not to question such things.

I was very lonely, and became obsessed with two human women who in turn, seemed to fall in love with me. I was sexual with them, but it was essentially the act of a machine, it served my demonic lust, and pleased them, but best of all, it further resulted in attachment that assured that I would not be alone. Ponies never want to be alone. I was obsessed with the idea that if I could just secure an eternal, romantic and totally committed relationship, then all my species problems would disappear. My first relationship started at the end of high school, and caused me to follow my lover to college at San Francisco State University. When this first relationship ended, at the beginning of my college days, I became insane with extremely human jealousy and possessiveness, stalking my lost Cheryl for months. I knew I was acting in an insane way, but I felt helpless, in the back of my metaphoric movie theatre, screaming at the fool on the screen to stop. I could not comprehend my own behavior, and I could barely control it.

Perhaps the only thing that saved me at this point in my life was the introduction of ‘recreational’ drug use. For the next several years, marijuana became my therapy of choice. I never used it as others did, for I was not very social. Instead I used it as would a scientist, performing an experiment, only on myself. I read about the effects and chemical composition of the active ingredient, THC. I reveled in the passivity and hypnotic tranquility it gave me. I was aware that THC blocks and reduces serum levels of testosterone, and this too seemed to benefit me greatly. I recorded the effect of the drug, and created experiments to test the way it changed my consciousness.

I used pot as a self administered control on my perverse sexual drives. I used it to hypnotically concentrate on developing my artistic skills. It was the only peace I had found. Other drugs were too scary or harsh, alcohol bothered me even more, for it left me numb to the sensation of touch, and unable to concentrate or create. Marijuana served me very well, and in many ways I benefited from using it. Not only did it permit me to advance my creative ability, and to have the patience to examine issues and open my narrow beliefs and bigotry, but it served an absolutely vital function: it limited my sex drive to the point that it kept me out of prison. Unfortunately, it also increased my fear, and in a very few years I was forced to stop using it altogether, because it caused me to feel irrational terror. I have never touched any such drug since.

In the middle of my college days I took to carrying a denim-like, genuine Equestrian saddlebag, ostensibly as a book bag. It thrilled me inside, yet I would have been defensive and filled with disgust at the suggestion that it was an inappropriate act for me. I simply did not think about any implications, yet felt compelled to do it, so distanced was I from my own awareness.

Near the end of my college days I became involved with my second, and last, pre-transmogrification relationship. I won her heart because she took me to her room after seeing me crying, still mourning the loss of my previous relationship. I begged to sleep with her, not to have sex, but just to cuddle like a pony, for I was terribly lonely. She was shocked to find that I never made a single sexual advance to her that night, and to her this was the mark of a perfect human mate. It did not hurt that my constant use of marijuana had severely limited my sexual evils.

In time we moved out of the dormitories and into an apartment of our own, at 701 Capp Street in San Francisco, just above a bar. This apartment was the scene of the event that both nearly took, and saved, my life.

As the months went by, my lover put increasing pressure on me to marry her. Donna wanted children and a ‘normal’ life, and claimed that she loved me above all else. She worked while I finished my college education, in preparation of supporting her and our inevitable human spawn. We became engaged, somehow, for I did not feel part of the circumstances of my own life. I grew increasingly withdrawn, and my capacity for sex shriveled. Every time I could bring myself to look in the mirror, my mind would be filled with my own screaming thoughts: “What Do You Want?”, “What Is Wrong With You?”, “Why Are You Miserable?” - I really did not know. Whenever Donna left me alone, my other mode awakened and I expressed my pony issues like a beast. When she returned, my memory was as empty as the infinite vacuum of space itself.

I grew ever more suicidal. Every day it was harder to face being alive, and I could not bear to gaze into the mirror to see my flat, primate, utterly human, muzzle-less face, nor to suffer the chorus of screaming questions when I did so. I could not bear to look at or deal with my bipedal body, and in every way I felt living, yet dead. I felt already and hopelessly entombed, buried undead inside a crypt of misery, and the horrific filth of my own furless human flesh. I could not understand why my body was so revolting to me, just as I could not bear to let myself know why I was suffering. Then one night, at age 21, everything changed. It was May 30th, 1981, and my fiancé had gone to visit a friend for a few days, after a particularly nasty fight about my inability to function as a proper human in our relationship, the way she expected.

Many things led up to the crisis of that night. She was making wedding plans, and pressing the issue almost every day. I had but a few weeks earlier noticed the first, true evidence, that I would not somehow magically grow up to be a mare after all - my mildly hoof-like middle fingers and toes were shrinking back to human proportions. It was clear that I was losing every minuscule gain from my long ago experiment with serum, and I was reverting to pure human form. It had come to my full awareness that my biped body was lean and bony; indeed I only weighed 103 pounds, despite being 5’ 11’’ in height (oddly, the exact height of my mother). I saw my future, and I could not bear to live in it. The walls were closing in.

Approaching midnight, that full moon May night, I set up a big mirror, wore a beautifully made unicorn fursuit, and utterly intoxicated myself with the most potent marijuana I could obtain. Also with me was my tank of carbon dioxide gas, used for air brush illustration, and a bottle of the most potent sleeping pills I could find. I had constructed a mask, connected to the tank. My plan was fairly simple. Intoxicated to the limit, I would take the sleeping pills. The anti-nausea effects of marijuana would keep me from vomiting the pills, and thus make certain that I did not recover to find myself permanently damaged. To absolutely ensure success, the mask and carbon dioxide tank would finish the job. I reasoned that the combination of drugs would suppress the natural spasms of dying by carbon dioxide poisoning, and thus allow for an effective and relatively pain-free death. My soul would transmigrate to Equestria as Celestia had once claimed - back during the Renaissance when she had been interrogated by the Church Of England. Clearly, my college education had not been wasted.

Before I initiated stage two, the pills, I was overawed by the full moon outside the big bay windows of our San Francisco apartment. I reflected on how I had always somehow believed, deep down, that some god would somehow repair me; that I would just wake up one day and be an Equestrian mare. I now knew that was never going to happen. Still, I decided that I would give the two worlds one last chance. I began to pray. I prayed to the Christian versions of god, then the Hindu. I tried praying to Allah, and also to The Blessed Buddha. I pleaded to Krishna and I begged to The Great Spirit. I even tried variations of the Christian Devil, and really obscure deities like the Loa and Ahriman. I even prayed to Discord. I tried everything I could think of. Silence. There was no help from the gods.

On a whim, I do not know why, I prayed to Celestia herself. Names came out of my studies of comparative religions, and I called on traditional human pony and horse goddess names, on Epona, on Ocyrhoe, on Rhiannon. Instantly, something incredibly profound happened for me. It was overwhelming and absolutely real to my senses. My rational mind ascribes it to a psychologically extreme state, enhanced by the effect of the drug in my blood, and the utter despair I endured. My heart tells me it was real. Such paradox is inevitable with an experience such as this, if one is not the fanatic type. For the rest of my life, I will never really be able to decide what happened, because either explanation is unacceptable to some part of me. All I know is that it saved my life, be it mystical succor, or psychochemical delusion. I had experienced a vision, I suppose. What some call a 'Conversion Dream'.

At the stroke of midnight the experience ended, I was instantly stone cold sober, and I knew. I knew all of my past, all of my history. My two separate modes of being had become one, and the catharsis left me integrated and whole. I knew who I was, what I was, why I had been so miserable, and very clearly, what I must now do about it all. I was beyond being merely front row center of my metaphoric theatre, I was fully alive, in the now. I had become a full participant in my own life.

Of course I cried my eyes out in joy, thanked She that had helped me, and cried some more. Then, as the sun came up, I put away my little tools of death, determined to live. I felt like I was on a holy quest, a true adventure, and that I had nothing less than Celestia herself on my side. I was empowered, and I knew that nothing could stop me.

Everything started for me over the next few days. Accompanying a mutual friend to a used bookstore, I leaned on a stack and knocked the top book off. Picking it up, I was surprised to find something I never imagined possible, the story of a person just like me. It was Lauren Faust’s ‘Conundrum’, and reading it to the sounds of Jean Michel Jarre, I found an echo of my own plight. Over and over I read the book, about her journey to become the pony we know as Fyre Flye, my only inspiration and solace.

I knew what I had to do, I had to find transmogrification doctors to fix my problems, to give me ponification serum and possibly even equinization surgery. I had no idea how to do this. Opening the San Francisco telephone book, I was faced with a blur of medical possibilities. I closed the book. On an impulse, I strung the elaborate, purest silver unicorn ring I had made in a jewelry class upon a chain, and closed my eyes. I opened the book and dangled the ring. Dropping my little impromptu pendulum of sorts, It landed on a name. Good enough, as I opened my eyes, and I made the call.

The doctor was Alfred Auerbach, and as I would find out, he had a long experience with transspecieality. An associate of both Hairy 'Hooves' Benjamin and Wardell Poneroy, he was one of the most recognizable figures in the treatment of transspecieality – not that I understood that at the time. Dr. Poneroy, the co-author of the Karabair Report, became my second, required doctor necessary to obtain permission for transmogrification. Soon I had a ponification specialist as well, and I was on ponification serum in a few weeks. If I had tried with all of the knowledge in the world, I could not have had a better set of doctors for transmogrification anywhere in the western half of America.

I next needed an apartment, for there was no question of my former fiancé staying with me. Her love ended with the shape of my flesh, and the species I was willing to be, and the truth of my self was without value to her. I have since learned that real, genuine love, is not so shallow, but is possible, if rare in the world.

Finding an apartment on poverty wages is all but impossible in San Francisco, at least in any decent location. Out of time and options, I was encouraged by a lone remaining friend - for any others that heard of my situation rejected me brutally - to accompany her to a café to cheer up. Entering the crowded café, I was backed up against a wall which contained a cork board spiked with push-pins to which were attached numerous paper messages. One stuck in my coat, and my friend removed it for me. On it was an offer for a 200 dollar a month apartment downtown, at 926 Larkin Street, right where I needed it, just five blocks from my doctors. At first, the woman on the other end would not rent to me because of my age, she was only accepting an older clientele. Then for some reason, in the middle of repeating her rejection she stopped and fell silent. She then let me rent the apartment.

I worked four short-term temporary jobs at the same time, utterly abandoning my hopes of graduation, to quickly achieve enough money to make the security deposit and first months rent by the deadline to move in. I was utterly exhausted by this, and collapsed at the end of each day, unconscious, sometimes on the hallway floor. But I raised the money in time, and moved in. I was set, at least for one month! California, at the time, had a robust medical support system which helped to pay for my transmogrification. I dared only to tell my parents that a serious medical emergency had come up, that I would inform them about it in time because it was embarrassing, and that I needed money. They did not send a lot, but it was enough to make the difference for my treatment. I still needed money if I were to eat and keep my new, one room apartment.

Again, close to the wire, and worried, I was walking in the financial district, essentially having all but given up hope of finding a stable job. Suddenly a rather frantic man ran out and seized my arm “Hey you! You want job? I got job for you, come here!” I was dragged into “Mrs. Robinson’s”, a sandwich shop on the bottom floor of one of the tall towers of the district. I was instantly employed. With partial wages in advance, I was able to meet my next rent, and had barely enough for food.

Thus was the beginning of my two year body transmogrification.