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Existing as a protoss
Updated 6/12/25
For all intents and purposes, I’m on my own. If there are other protoss, I can’t find them. I have no idea if my experiences vary or if they’re similar to theirs. The main reason I was inspired to write this essay, was not just to bring my experiences out there, but to help anyone questioning whether or not they are a protoss. Despite the difficulties it brings me in this life and without sounding too emotional, I find the experience itself to be a gift. The secondary reason is putting this out there for anyone curious enough to read it. I expect most readers of this essay will have no prior understanding as to what a protoss is, or a minimal understanding of one, so I will try to elaborate when it's needed. As of posting this essay onto my dreamwidth, this is the only alterhuman essay on what it's like to be one on the internet.
To start, protoss are an alien species from a video game called Starcraft. It would fall under a fictionkin identity, but I personally don’t like to refer to myself as one. To me, the game is more like a piece of media based on true events, where some of the events may have been exaggerated to make it more cinematic. Excluding cosmic horror, (which also feels real to me when I read it, and contains aspects of it within Starcraft), this connection is much different than any of my other relations to different pieces of fiction. It also impacts the way I interact with the game. Although I don't feel particularly euphoric and happy when I play as a protoss, I can get a bit dysphoric when I'm commanding another species' forces. And there are some campaign missions I find myself unable to do without getting enraged or upset.
It still definitely falls under the otherkin umbrella. Since 2017, I believe to be a non canon Nerazim protoss, and live as one in my past life, and that life significantly impacts my current one, to the point where it feels like a continuation of that life. The Nerazim are a faction of protoss that were exiled for not wanting to be part of an empathetic telepathic link.I will touch upon this later on in the essay. In essence, I feel as if I'm an amnesiac protoss. I started this life thinking I was human, ignoring my faint instincts, impressions and dreams until I learned where it originated from. I react to things as a protoss would.
Due to the length of the essay, I have organized the essay into these different sections: 'On How it 'Started',' 'On Culture,' 'On Connection', 'On Language,' 'On Mental Shifts','On Habits, 'On Phantom Shifts,' & 'On Memories.'
On how it 'Started'
For some time before I questioned being one, I always felt like I was missing a part of myself. I also had phantom limbs that I couldn't trace the origins of. Bipedal, sharp claws, digitigrade legs with a head crest that I mistook as horns at first. And other than feeling that my face should be sharper, more angular and a bit spikier, I don't really get any face shifts. But at times, like when I wake up, I might forget that I have a nose or ears. When that happens, I just laugh and make a joke about it. So it's nothing that really freaks me out.
There’s more to it than just feeling familiar to me. I have always felt something different, and felt something tragically missing but I didn’t know what. I wished I was a ton of creatures within the first two decades of life. The main difference between what I feel with protoss in contrast with other creatures or animals is that I’m not just dreaming hopelessly and wishing I was one. I realized that a lot of my fleeting fiction or animal flickers such as when I thought I was something else was influenced by other people and by popular culture.
Although there is nothing wrong with that happening, this time it was a state of being myself and wasn’t influenced by others, but something that rose naturally. I realize that as I became older, I started to get less and less influenced by external things. These external things include new types of interests, as well as influences from other people. I want to add that for all intents and purposes I shouldn’t have these feelings from a game I barely ever play, especially to a game I played after my developmental years. I can confidently say that I couldn’t have imprinted on it because I simply didn’t know about it back then. You would think that I'd latch onto a creature from a game I actually play a lot of, but you'd be wrong.
It's been present throughout my life, for as long as I can remember. I just didn't notice it at the time. I'd go through my old notebooks from the years I was in school and find a symbol or drawing that looks eerily similar to protoss architecture, before knowing anything about it. There are likely many more dreams and noemata I've had that have been now long forgotten with time. When I was a teenager and had a facebook, I even wrote something along the lines of "I'm some sort of creature, but I don't know what." I did know something subconsciously was up, but I had no name or place for it.
I've also tried to write some world building and make up my own story from scratch. Sadly, I've only written a few pages before losing interest. Aside from some other unrelated stuff, it turns out that this original fiction I wrote was basically a brief, eerily accurate synopsis of the lore from my source before I even got into it or knew about it. Complete with powerful alien entities leaving crystals behind, an evil queen that wanted to take over the world and infiltrate the shadow warden's base, and a species of alien that sounds close to word protoss, petrak. If I did manage to continue my world building back then, I don't think it would have been a stretch to have based this species on my own latent phantom shifts at the time. And if the word petrak was any indication, I was going for an alien species centered around the motif of rocks and gems. Some more random examples and experiences that I had before this discovery can be found in this post.
I first questioned this possibility once I actually first dove deeply into the lore in order to roleplay a protoss better for a friend's campaign. I figured out that many things clicked. This was actually the second time that a friend tried to introduce me to the lore. I didn't pay attention to it the first time around, which I will speak about later on in the essay. And the tragic irony was that while trying to look into the lore to learn more about it, I began to read a novel about a human who in essence, gained a protoss headmate after having a dead protoss' consciousness join his human brain. He learned about being a protoss through this connection, and even the small aspects of species dysphoria that this brought to the protoss spirit in being in a human body. As you'd expect, I felt extremely weird during reading this, especially since I didn't know what I was getting into when I began to casually read the book for fun, and I wasn't consciously seriously considering this as a possibility before reading it. The writer didn't really get the sensations of what it was like being in a protoss body down. It was something I had to discover little by little, as that doubt faded away.
During this time, I was extremely against being a protoss because of the way it made me feel at first, internalized cringe included. The first feeling I felt when I considered this possibility was shame, embarrassment and existential anxiety. I still occasionally feel these emotions, especially existential anxiety. But as the years passed, I feel more proud and honored to be a protoss. After all, how can being a protoss in mind and spirit be shameful? I am not often arrogant or overconfident but I hold them to a very high standard I’m not consciously aware of and view them superior to humans in some ways. I get these thoughts without trying to think about it and without wanting to be offensive or rude about it. When people talk to me, I never give off that vibe because it's not expressible unless I'm actively rp'ing as one for fun with friends. And that's especially the case since I usually express under confidence in myself externally to other people. I find myself unable to make human ocs from the source because it also triggers my dysphoria. As you'd expect, out of the three species, I HAVE to rp a protoss, no question about it, even before I considered being one. It's like an imperative to me.
I just feel very comfortable looking at their culture and it felt like one of the many things I was missing while growing up as a normal human and while being raised as one. What do I mean about culture? Humans have cultures and they’re different all across the world but none click with me 100%, including the one I was raised in. I will talk about this in more detail further down the essay.
One entry that I wrote in a few forums when I first discovered this identity back in 2017 are as follows:
When I first looked into the lore and story of a particular video game, I realized there were many parts of the alien culture that I understood and related to at a very strange level. It also felt very familiar despite only learning about this lore only two years ago so it wasn't something present in my childhood that I imprinted on. It resonated a lot with me, more than anything else ever did. Many of my beliefs and mannerisms also resembled a lot like a creature belonging to their culture despite being raised as a normal human in a pretty different culture from the alien ones. It scared me at first because I didn't understand how I could feel this way to something fictional if it didn't exist but I managed to accept it eventually. It took me a few months to just accept it for what it is.
At the time, I wasn’t comfortable sharing what I was or the source I was from. So I kept it vague.
Figuring out I was a protoss allowed me to work through a bunch of difficulties I had because I discovered what the root cause of some of my issues were. Most notably it helped me work out my extreme fear of abandonment, despite never having been abandoned to the level that it would cause me that much pain. Which by the way, abandonment is apparently a deep ancestral wound in the protoss psyche. After coming to terms with this, my anxiety on abandonment greatly diminished. I also felt insufficient because I had difficulty coming to terms with humanity's obsession with sex and romance as someone who is asexual and aromantic. I’m very bad at being a human. I've acted irrationally in the past because of my anxiety. I feel much freer and comfortable now when I learned to just accept myself instead of trying to fit in a box that I can't fit inside. I feel that I was living a lie caused by the upbringing of living in human society. I finally learned that I didn’t need to be like other people or befriend them or have an obligation to do so. All of this happened because I finally learned the reason why I didn’t feel human.
On culture
I have certain philosophical and spiritual beliefs on how reality works that isn't exactly found in any earthly religions or beliefs. There might be similarities but there's always a few differences that I'd disagree with. When I looked into protoss culture and society, particularly the dark templar, or Nerazim culture, I felt at home, comfortable and found that it explained a lot of my feelings and behaviors. And even after 20 years of being raised as a normal human, human society still feels weird, alien and strange to me. Growing up, I felt like an outcast and couldn't find any friends that I had anything in common with. So I never really felt like a normal human ever.
I want to bring up that I am a pantheist, where there is no actual individual that counts as god. Rather, everything that makes up reality is itself god. But if there was a 'god' that went around seeding the universe with life, it would have been something on a cosmic scale, eldritch godlike aliens. That is much more sensible to me and that’s exactly what’s going on in Starcraft lore, (the xel'naga-whom I did study as a xenoarchaeologist.). But they're not as gods as you would know one from earth's religions. Whereas a vast majority of gods are centered on earth and whatever humanity does, these alien gods traveled the universe. Still, I’m currently trying to sort out what was real and what is just a myth or a legend in my universe. That is extremely difficult and I don’t think I will ever find an answer.
And as a disclaimer that I find very important to mention here, I'm not an ancient alien conspiracy theorist. I think their views are a misappropriation of actual science and archaeology and veiled with racism. My own experiences manages to give me a much more sobering and critical look at this field in general. It gives me a basis to compare what true xenoarchaeology looked like in my source to the way that pseudoarchaeologists do it here.
A lot of details on protoss culture are really unknown and vague but I do know they hold a larger perspective of everything at large and see how it adds up to the whole more than the average person does. So I tried to piece it together with my intuition. They’re socialistic, and as far as the Nerazim tribes and the unified protoss body of government (called the Daelaam), without dictators that limit rights by the time Starcraft 2 ended. I will note that I believe that I lived a thousand years after that point. Philosophy, religion and science were also much more closely tied together. At least more closely held together than they are in modern, western human culture. They’re seen as right next to each other in protoss society rather than two opposite things.
With the Nerazim in particular, they are shadowy, sneaky/rogue-ish and scary looking at times but despite that, they are honorable and morally 'good' as a whole. For the layperson, I will compare them to ninjas because they both fall under the same tropes. In so many human societies and even in other protoss societies, things that are dark are sinister, especially things that actually use ‘dark’ void energy. But here it’s not the case. Wielding it doesn’t make you evil but like anything, misusing it or abusing it does. It was always a stereotype I didn’t like. I have always rooted for people who fulfill the archetypal role of the dark and misunderstood. Another part of Nerazim culture that I feel is unlike earth’s is that although they are individualistic and willful, they aren’t usually as selfish as some individualistic humans can be.
Everything about the protoss just makes sense to me. So when an unreliable human narrator in Starcraft points out that protoss are very different and mysterious to humans. Other than human narrators talking about our physical appearance, I have difficulty understanding what these strange and mysterious aspects are. Many of their behaviors isn’t that strange and mysterious to me. Even in the lore, there is a sort of confusion and mystery hanging over the protoss. As much as I hate the vagueness that exists in the source, it lets me flex my intuition a bit without having the answer relayed onto me sometimes. But it’s very slow work.
I feel a strong sense of familiarity when looking at their architecture. I don’t believe it’s from my childhood because like I mentioned, I didn’t properly look into the game until 2017. I also have to mentally prepare myself when looking at content from the game, especially if it’s realistic looking and I realize that the longer I am away from the source, the stronger the feelings are. I get desensitized when I constantly view it. I can avoid the source for years and have the feelings come back stronger when I come back to it, even though the feelings are always there even when not interacting with it.
Looking at modern human architecture just fills me with a sense of dread. These buildings just make me feel like I don’t belong here. It could be because I believe I was stranded on a human planet for an indeterminate amount of time and that just stuck to me. That said, I do like old stone buildings from thousands of years ago but I believe that to be because of my interest in archaeology,
Protoss did have things similar to that but it was from the prehistoric up to the modern era for them due to aesthetics, and made out of metals, crystals and stones. It could also be because locating ancient, potentially alien artifacts was an interest of mine. This was also a pretty popular job within Nerazim culture, a stereotype I fall into.
On Connection
I'm not totally sure if this is my asexual perceptive talking or noema, but I don't think protoss value sex and have it centered around their culture the way humans do. I feel that platonic relationships are much more common in protoss society, compared to human society. A side effect that I think being a protoss gives me is that I have trouble befriending people and having things in common with them. I’m just too different and introverted. I feel too different from many people, especially while growing up. I went to a private school during my elementary school years and despite growing up in the same ethnic culture and sharing the same language, I couldn't be any more foreign. It’s easier now to befriend others with similar interests on the internet at least. Maybe I’m neurodivergent in some way, but I’d still identify as I do now even if I had an easy time being a human and socializing with them. My disconnection from humanity also contributes to me being aro ace. I guess I just don’t find humans that appealing to look at. At the same time, I can’t imagine being interested in someone in that way if I’m forced to live in this body because I find it very dysphoric.
I’m not sure if I actually felt romantic attraction in this lifetime even though I've had little kid crushes before, or if it can even be considered romantic attraction based on a human's comprehension of it. My brain processes these thoughts differently. When I think about romance or sex and being part of those activities, it just feels so weird and unnatural and I think part of it is because I am not human. However, I may have also been ace as a protoss, if I am to use a human term to describe an alien understanding of attraction. It wouldn’t be comparable to the way humans experience it.
I get a certain sort of emotion whenever I read or see comradery and solidarity in a way that reminds me of the way my species expresses warmth in media. I don't get this emotion when it's only between humans, only between non human characters, and it doesn't even have to be between people of my own species. But if they are telepathic, it can make that feeling I experience even stronger. Even though we were able to communicate at a distance without physical touch being required, physical touch made it stronger. It's comparable to the way that vulcans are touch telepaths in Star Trek, ie mind melding.
It's a very particular and powerful feeling that I seldom get. But reading or seeing physical touch and non romantic affection seems to cause this feeling. And I'm not even someone who craves physical attention in my daily life. But that may be because it isn't sparked by humanity, and I am always surrounded by them. It's a feeling of deep longing, of wanting to be seen and respected, nostalgia, bitter sweet sadness. It feels almost painful, as if I am missing something. In my normal, day to day life, I rarely ever feel emotions so powerful and overwhelming. But whenever it comes to something related to protoss in some way, it hits me deeply. It feels as if it's something rare and abnormal amongst humans. Although not a direct translation, I believe the closest term for this would be queer platonic based around telepathic communication. Despite what you'd believe, Nerazim can feel things deeply as well, despite rejecting the Khala, (the communal, empathetic telepathic link I mentioned earlier). Perhaps the species itself feels things in a stronger way than most humans, and in a different way. Being able to feel these emotions, despite being overwhelming, feels like a blessing to me. This actually manifests as a highly specific physical symptom for me. It makes me feel as if the palms of my hands are burning.
When I first learned more about the infatuation and obsession aspects of what humans feel like in love, I remember feeling so surprised that humans had this instinct to just ditch everything and move away from everyone they know. I learned about it when I was 10 and am just as confused as the day I heard it. This entire instinct is just another completely foreign concept to me. I wouldn’t want to abandon everyone I know and just live with a partner and child. Although I did frequently travel by myself often back then, either for a job or for personal reasons, I’d return to the friends and family I knew.
Next, I'll touch on this species's gender dimorphism and go over it. I am fully aware that different species have different understandings of sex characteristics and gender identity. Human gender identity is not directly comparable with protoss gender, and neither are certain sex characteristics. Still, protoss do have some form of dimorphism in canon, but I doubt the accuracy of this dimorphism in my canon. I think that the human creators pull on what they know from human society along with its standards and projected it onto an alien species. However, in my mind, they are not as dimorphic as humans. The way this impacts me in the present is that I don’t really identify as either gender, and I don’t want human sexual characteristics at all. I call myself nonbinary to get the point across.
I’m actively trying to sort out different biases I might have on how I expect different protoss sexes to look. It stresses me out but I try hard to make sure that what I view as memories aren’t sorted through a human-influenced mind. I want to see it as it truly is: without the brain interfering with what is true. As of writing this, I currently think that a ‘female’ protoss is taller and thinner than a ‘male’ protoss, that is all. I wouldn’t put it past them to have a significant overlap in how they express this dimorphism and for multiple sexes to also exist. I would need more time to figure this out.
On Language
Protoss have a spoken, telepathic language called khalani. Some words and phrases already listed and well known canonically, I sometimes question how accurate those words actually are in my source. I’m trying to piece together the language during random bursts of insight that come from nowhere in the form of noemata.
Typically, when it comes to getting more words on my own without any outside help, the most I can get are a few random words while I'm meditating or falling asleep. I get this flash of insight and know what the sound I heard means. Though sometimes I might think of a sound or a word without knowing the definition of it. I really don't know if these words are real or something my brain came up with on the spot. And if it is real, I don't know if the word I heard actually sounds like the way I 'heard it' or if it's just my mind trying to interpret the noise. But there really isn't any harm in listing those words I get insights for down as definitions in my journal. In a way, I am creating a conlang, but I don’t feel comfortable making up random words and their definitions, I want it to come to me. Although, I hope that I will one day reach a point where I will feel comfortable without worrying about how accurate I am.
On Mental Shifts
Although I'm always shifted, I may get minor mental shifts where I feel extremely strange and off put by my surroundings. It’s similar to dissociation but without the confusion and haziness, although I get that too. The things I mentioned in the above few paragraphs can be attributed to these mild mental shifts I get. It stems from this extreme sense of being in the wrong place and ‘lost’. I look into the source's lore/history and afterwards, when I interact with this life, I get the sense that it’s wrong and misplaced. I get the feeling like I’m in the wrong body, which can be tied to phantom shifts but the feeling I get sometimes seems to be more distracting than the actual phantom limbs. It’s again, a feeling of wrongness. It’s in times like these where I feel like I need to adjust to this body and species.
For example, one day I saw these two humans hugging each other by a bunch of trees. Then I suddenly felt like a nature documentary narrator, thinking about how different creatures behave and interact with their environment. I began thinking about how those behaviors were involved with mating, survival and reproduction. I also get the sense of ‘otherness’ when I look at humans while alone with my thoughts. I realize that in the memories I have, I also take these observation behaviors like a scientist would when confronted with different species. If I truly stand back and think about it too hard, my mouth and nose disorientates me even though I can talk and breathe fine in reality. However at times, when I’m feeling tired or have just woken up, I can touch my face and feel surprised when I feel my nose sticking out of my face. It can end up feeling like wearing a mask, or a costume.
I have a life long habit of masking my nonhumanity. When someone calls my name, I go through some sort of faint mental shift and end up silently staring at them in a way that reminds me of something inhuman. I realize now that when I just allow myself to just be, without worrying or presenting a certain way, I do sometimes do little head tilts and abrupt head movements that I attribute to being a protoss. And it is always tied to some sort of social interaction or a response. Such as bowing the head and exposing the nerve cords, behind it (a group of nerves, analogous to human hair, but actually part of the nervous system), as a sense of visual apology, or tilting my head downwards and looking away to represent regret or sadness. Yes, we are telepathic but protoss do have some amount of body language that we use, Khala or not.
I do feel like I should be telepathic and wish that I was. I'm pretty good at vibe checking people and sensing their energy without needing to actually read their minds. But I'm honestly not totally sure up to what extent this is due to being a protoss or just a thing I'm normally good at, or both. I can't rule out this ability as something that's purely psychological or spiritual in nature. Still, I do get pretty annoyed that I can't just project an image over to someone through telepathy and vice versa. Instead I have to verbally describe it to them. For example, I'm also pretty bad at following verbal directions as well, so it's easy for me to get confused on finding where something is. Especially since I'm a visual learner. What I find the most frustrating is that I'm not able to communicate with animals as effectively as I could with telepathy for obvious reasons.
I may be mildly psychic as I do get accurate premonitions through dreams and may sometimes get an impression of what someone is thinking. But the impressions I get from others is not something I can objectively measure. And it may as well just be my unconscious intuition working. I've mentioned more of my abilities with understanding time over here. My mind is good at multitasking and juggling different thoughts and scenarios at once, although it's easy for everything to get jumbled when I try to speak it out loud to other people, where you can only say so many things at once. And this also extends to the protoss, (of course it does.) They are able to "run multiple parallel thoughts and scenarios simultaneously in seconds", which is something my mind can closely approximate.
Another thing I experience is that I constantly feel too old and too young at the same time. Since protoss can live over a thousand years, this gives me a possible explanation as to why I might feel like this. I feel way older than I actually am, possibly due to living past lives where I lived longer. Conversely, I feel too young to be an adult, and that I’m running out of time to do everything that I want. If protoss are adolescents at 50, that feels like it would give me another 25-50 years of figuring things out. But one year is one year gone so I have this sense of urgency to do “something.” It takes me longer to come up with plans and long term ideas because I tend to see the years in a much longer time frame. Aging as fast as a human does fills me with EXTREME distress and dread, with no true coping mechanisms available to help me get through this.
On Habits
I'll go over some of the habits and skills I have currently that I believed bled over from this previous life. I have a pretty innate understanding of energy work and how energy moves throughout my body as well as how to manipulate it even though nothing is physically there. I’m talking about it in more of a tai chi way rather than an actual ‘magical’ way. When I took tai chi a few years ago, it felt really natural and I felt that I’ve done some of the movements before when I haven’t. It’s the same thing with wing chun, a lot of the moves feel similar and I can grasp them easily.
When I panic, some martial arts moves that I haven’t really trained or done before emerge, especially moves involving my bo staff. These are movements that I maybe done once or twice in my life time, but there's no good explanation as to why it's in my muscle memory. I usually need much more repetition than that to get specific movement down. Another strange thing is my supposed innate understanding of how to move, strike and disarm someone with a bo staff despite receiving no training and it’s not something I can consciously do and instead it’s something that comes out instinctively when I panic. Even though I panic, none of these situations were dangerous and were with acquaintances as a teenager or younger. I believe this is as close to a 'berserker shift' as I've been to. It is strange and very contradictory in a way. I lose control but at the same time I have the discipline and skill of an expert. This only lasts a few seconds. I've never hurt anyone in this state because I'm always focused on disarming rather than harming. If I'm ever put into an actual serious or potentially dangerous situation in this life, who knows how I will react then? But it's something I try to avoid for obvious reasons. I always entertained the idea that I was a martial artist in a past life, now I really think it’s the case. The closest thing I can compare this to is surprisingly, templar zealots. They can reach a berserker state at will and remain in control. Although I'm not some heavy, front line fighter, I also can induce this mentality while in danger. I don't know to what extent it's species specific and to what extent it's been trained in me as a dark templar. Though, I am betting that it's a species specific instinct.
During my teen years, I remember trying to find more information of any sort of earth martial art that had the same sort of techniques that I was practicing with; which was essentially using a double bladed pole weapon. All of my searches came up empty handed. I would forget about this for years until I stumbled upon one of the types of weapons that the Nerazim use: a double bladed scythe. Although I doubt how useful such a weapon can be without hitting yourself in the middle of combat, I believe that a similar concept was done in that life time. The only other example I can think of this sort of fighting style being used in fiction would be with the double bladed lightsabers from Star Wars. But they have too little hilt and too much blade. I do also feel some archetypal resonances with the concept of the Jedi due to their similarities with some aspects of protoss culture.
In my prior life, I did fight a lot and was often in a hyper vigilant state especially seeing that I apparently survived for centuries, fighting zerg and other things. I think it’s something that contributes to the anxiety I was born with. I feel these prior life experiences have caused them to manifest in a very particular way. At the same time, I sometimes get a bit of a prey drive where I want to hunt down dangerous creatures with my claws and sharp weaponry, wanting a challenge by fighting something that can put up a fight.
Hearing about war or thinking about it can exacerbate my hyper vigilance and cause me to go into something I call war mode or survival mode. In this state of mind, I fully expect to die at any second and have to fight brutally to survive. It’s technically abnormal because I feel like I have been through wars before, even though in this life I haven’t. My conclusion is that when my mind takes its anxiety disorder and mixes in exotrauma with this experience being the end result of that. My thoughts can become aggressive as I think of ways of taking down my enemies, usually through ambush since I expect myself to be outnumbered and outmatched. A lot of my thoughts involve using sharp weapons and claws, unsurprisingly at all. When I hear other people describing their anxiety, they don’t explain it the same way that I do.
When I want to escape and have no ways of escaping a situation, moving my body in a way that's actually natural for me during intense moments of anxiety very faintly alleviates the anxiety. I have been compared to a feral cat when I'm fully panicking, which I guess is true. But I don't really lose the ability to speak or rationalize things, minus the bad brain fog, and I still feel fully sapient. I feel the clawed hands the most when I'm nervous. They're my body's go-to weapon without fail. Even 6 years of martial arts does not remove this instinct.
Overall, although I’m not 'canon', I have worked with known characters before, particularly by working with them during archaeological dig sites not necessarily shown in game, or even during the game’s time frame. I also believe I managed to SOMEHOW survive to old age, and ended up outliving many of the people I knew. I suffer from survivor's guilt due to all of this. Because of all of the things that I experienced, it isn’t very good for my mental well being in this lifetime, but I have to just deal with it. Even if I didn’t have these experiences or exotrauma, I would still have this anxiety. This is just one method of trying to explain why I experience anxiety in this sort of manner.
On Phantom Shifts
My shifts are consistent (as in they don’t change and they are always there to some degree). I’ve had a majority of them before knowing where it’s from or what it was. I’ll mention that my phantom limbs are scaled down to be proportionate to my physical body (as I’m not currently 8 feet tall). The first thing I will mention is the digitigrade legs. That’s been ongoing since at least the year 2003 or 2004, perhaps even earlier. This started back when I wanted to be a cheetah during childhood. When I walk around with my normal human legs, I feel like my heel should be closer to my calf and that my toes should be longer to support my weight better. It feels very off when I realize that my smaller toes are not so good at holding my weight as my big toe does and it bothers me because I feel less stable since there is less surface area there. Still, walking on my toes helps me feel more comfortable sometimes. They have some similarities with ostrich feet, such as that protoss are also -probably- two toed as well, but there are still some differences with the rest of the leg. In a way, it makes sense for a bipedal creature to evolve to have legs like that. Compared to humans, the ancestors of birds were bipedal for millions of years longer than humans. A difference with protoss would be that their tibia is shorter than their femur.
As for my hands, I always moved them weirdly. It's hard to explain but I often grip things in a claw-like grasp. Sometimes I do this movement because I’m angry. After figuring out that protoss had a second thumb on the outside of their hand I began to always feel it. I'm not sure if I felt it from before and just ignored it, but I feel it without thinking about or focusing on it. It causes me to grip things using the outside or center of my hand rather than using my actual thumb. I sometimes use my pinky as a secondary thumb to grasp things. Occasionally I forget which side my thumb is on each hand if I can’t see it, like when it’s dark and I have to turn a door knob without seeing my hand. I get a phantom index finger sometimes, and have it held away from the center of my hand at an angle. During these times, it's orientated in a way so that it feels that my outer thumb is directly where my pinky is. I finally noticed it when I had only a partial view of my hand and kept accidentally thinking that my index finger was really my middle finger, multiple times. I also feel like my fingers and toes should be longer and not as short and stubby as they are.
I felt horns on my head without knowing what it was for a while. Nothing with horns added up but once I looked into what a protoss was it began to add up. It was in fact, a head crest. Similar to a triceratops in my opinion. Sometimes I have a little bit of difficulty to see where the actual top of my head ends sometimes so I sometimes have no idea how far I actually am from hitting something. So, I end up ducking if it's a few inches over my head just in case I don't overestimate the distance. But with the actual phantom limb itself, if I know where the object is, I sometimes know how far the back of my head crest is from the object without looking or doing any calculations to see how far it should be. It also feels like I have no or little space to move when there isn’t physically. I have really shitty spatial awareness too, so this is pretty strange, especially with how accurate it is. I have a generic ‘knowing’ on how my head crest is shaped through phantom shifts and intuition.
There's also my nerve cords connected to the back of my head, which I briefly mentioned earlier. Long story short, they look like wires or thick hair and are important to the mainstreamTM khalai protoss. In all protoss, they are actually extensions emerging from the brain, part of the central nervous system. Nerazim cut these things short and are important to their culture, to disconnect themselves from the Khala that I mentioned earlier. (This is a whole other discussion and have discussed it in my Nerazim essay.) I often feel something connected to the lower part of my head, near my neck, especially if something touches it. When I think about having the phantom nerve cords cut -by watching a cut scene, reading about it, or sometimes thinking about it- I feel a dull pain down my neck, where these nerves would have traveled or have a connection to. In hindsight, I always felt comfortable having wire shaped things by my neck and shoulder area which is similar to how nerve cords look. They feel similar to earphone wires or those hood aglets some sweaters have. When I pay attention to this shift in particular, I realize that it is anatomically consistent with severed nerve cords, where the cords just stick out and end near the center of this body’s shoulder blades. It also feels very uncomfortable when someone touches the back of my upper neck and head, comparable to having something poking your eye if it's not expected. I also sometimes get these superficial psychosomatic aches on my skin along where the ridges and sides of my head crest and cheek bones would be. But I know that it's psychosomatic because it sometimes comes when I think about it and the discomfort goes away the second I lightly tap the spot that feels achy.
I occasionally experience something which I don't believe I've ever heard anyone else describe before, with what I call double-phantom limbs. When I was young, likely before I started my training, I had full length nerve cords. I sometimes feel something vaguely behind my back, almost to the back of my knees, but it is rare and almost feels like a cameo shift.
As a small addendum: I unironically have a fear of hiveminds, lack of individuality and losing my sense of self. Even the communal link that the mainstream protoss had fills me with unease, even if there’s something familiar about it in the extreme back of my mind. If you go far enough back, all protoss once had this link, and I still feel that evolutionary familiarity from time to time, even if I’m so very far detached from it in the present and in this body. I don’t like it. More about this can be found in this essay. The full length nerve cords gives me dysphoria even though it's part of normal protoss anatomy, but I had it severed for a reason.
As for not having a nose, ears, or mouth, it was something I hadn't considered at all prior to questioning them. Because I didn’t really get any sort of phantom shifts on my face at all, other than mild differences like sharper cheekbones, thicker brow ridges and a differently shaped face. They were easily ignored by me. My eyes feel that they should be larger and have a wider peripheral view, comparable to a feline's. The next two paragraphs can be skipped if it makes the reader uncomfortable while I talk about these phantom shifts.
Even with protoss, they can still breathe. It would feel and be more freeing to be able to breathe through pores/stomata throughout my body (similar to plants). They breathe through their skin and that skin is much more porous and allows for oxygen to enter this way. I feel like I should be able to breathe through my neck, chest, stomach, along my spine, ribs, and limbs. I feel that I should also be able to drink water through my skin, in a vaguely similar way with how amphibians drink without actually being amphibious. Sometimes, I don't even notice I'm thirsty until I feel water hit my hands. This sensation causes me to feel that I can actually drink through them instinctively. It also feels pretty dysphoric when I still feel thirsty after washing my face. Because in the back of my mind, it feels that something is wrong with me. That I should be able to do this, but can't. And when I do occasionally go swimming, I subconsciously feel that I am breathing less effectively because 95% of my body is under water. This is despite having my head above water and being able to breathe just fine.
It feels weird to have a nose or mouth. Sometimes the lower part of my face just feels numb even though it’s not. I also don’t really feel my nose or ears some of the time and almost forget that they’re there. That probably sounds creepy to some people but it’s not. It’s part of my internal body map sometimes even though I know that they are not there. Protoss are photosynthetic and less picky about the sunlight they use compared to earth's plant and bacteria. There are a lot of times where I wish I can just take energy from the sun just by standing outside or going about my day without having to worry to sit down and eat. And I do get the urge to be outside in the heat on a hot day, almost like sunbathing, but not for the reason of wanting to get a tan. I prefer temperatures in the low to mid 80's, (~26 to 30 degrees in celsius.)
Altogether, I have extremely consistent phantom shifts where everything anatomically makes sense without me even thinking about it or knowing about it until I actually look at how protoss anatomy is depicted.
On Memories
Even though I know that memories aren't the end all/be all of alterhumanity, and that they're not needed or important, I personally consider them to be very important to me. These are another set of experiences that I end up experiencing that really creeped me out a few times. Even before I was aware of my source, I'd see things that were very much like it was in the artwork or cinematics without even seeing it before, and I'd see it a lot more vividly like it was something real and life-like. Sometimes, I see things that aren't depicted, which makes me believe I'm not pulling all of this from this lifetime's memory. This already happened so many times that I just stopped questioning it so much.I've also unconsciously remembered specific events from my past and applied them to places and people I know from this life time.
I internally go through a strict questioning progress which depending on the memory, depends on how fast I sort it through. I want to see the true, unaltered, inhuman version of the memory without my mind trying to take control of the narrative. Another thing I’m aware of is that my current life experiences inevitably influence the potentially ‘true’ memories I have. For example, seeing a character and hearing them voiced as they were in the game. It could be my mind filling in blanks for me using current life experiences. I'm aware about unreliable memory can be. Assuming that I'm correct in these assumptions, I believe this was my brain's way of trying to comprehend what it's seen.
Some of the things I managed to verify to the best of my abilities are as follows:
I had some sort of a minor hallucination when I was 5 years old after waking up in the morning. I saw these ‘shooting stars’ falling down from my ceiling with a whitish glow. Panicking, I ran out of my room and it went away. I don’t really have issues with hallucinations, and only ever get auditory hallucinations or extremely rarely, visual hallucinations when I’m almost asleep or sleepy. Thinking back, I realize I have strong evidence of this being a possible memory, where it bled through my waking life. Seeing cut scenes 20 years later, I’m reminded of this experience when I saw protoss teleporting/warping in. They really do appear like shooting stars falling down from the sky, just like the ‘stars’ I saw when I was 5 years old.
I’ve seen places that look like Aiur (the name of the home planet) and other worlds in dreams before knowing those places existed. And those vivid dreams also had the same places in common each time I got them. I see a place that looks like the grand canyon, with huge waterfalls, a sky with alien planets and a jungle. It looked similar to the scenes I saw in sources of media only a hundred times more real. These sorts of dreams are surprisingly consistent. I’ve also meditated and seen the same things in the cinematics or in gameplay (just a lot more realistic) before actually seeing it. I honestly lost track of how many times this happened to me, over the years. They seem to add up, and haven’t found anything contradictory yet. For example, I got this glimpse of a flower in Shakuras, another planet, and believed that it resembled a black lily at the time.
Some of my most vivid memories that I see while I meditate are of realistic looking insectoids called zerg, including their structures, and like the other things I deem memories, they are very consistent. All of my memories are consistent over the months-years and don’t actually change that much. I also see archaeological or technological things. I often don't have a vivid imagination and when it's vivid, it's really vivid. My mind can either imagine a few stick figures worth of imagination or a vivid 3D movie type of imagination. A good portion of my imagination feels fake and unrealistic which is one of the markers I use in determining whether or not something is a memory. After compiling a bunch of these memories, I’m desensitized now when watching horror movies because none of that is as life-like as my own memories where weird and gross things are seen.
I had a dream that I saw part of the continental map of Aiur. I woke up and decided to draw what I saw. For the hell of it, I also began to draw the rest of the continents. I told myself, “Ok, this is just a random guess. There’s no way it can be accurate.” Some months later, I even drew over the drawing because I needed more room on the page I was drawing and didn’t give the map a second thought. A year after that, I decided to just compare the map I drew to a canonical map that I found one day. The similarities were easy to see, well beyond coincidence. For posterity, I decided not to erase the edge of the drawing on the lower right of the map and left it as is. The similarities still unnerve me, years later.
Here is the image in question:
And this one, I found years later:
I know it’s not an identical 1:1 comparison but I wouldn’t fare much better even now if I tried to draw Earth’s continents right now from memory. I somehow managed to get the three large continents right and the two largish islands, just with altered shapes. If you rotate the right most continent, shrink the island on the upper left side, stretched out the center most continent, it would have been a nearly exact match.
In conclusion- There's no easy way to sum up the reasons why I feel like I’m a protoss. It’s a collection of various subjective experiences that add up to that answer. It’s very hard for me to talk about my experiences with others because it requires providing a ton of context on what I’m talking about. The average person in the alterhuman community wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about and it would be difficult and tiring to explain it to everyone who asks. So there’s a degree of separation between myself and other people who feel nonhuman. I'm not sure how to go about living like I'm a normal human and pretending that these things aren't being experienced and known by me in ways I thought were impossible once. It is incredibly clear that I'm not a normal human. Even though all of these experiences are normal to me and have been there my entire life, they are abnormal to the orthohuman.
I have more specific examples on what I experience in my day to day life on my tumblr if anyone wants to read more about them.
To anyone questioning protoss, (even if it’s a tal’darim or ihaan'ri, I guess):
En aru’din Aiur