It's a little strange. I don't think anyone thinks of me as anything but coyote (and if they do, they've been very unvocal about it despite my urgings). I don't really think of myself as anything but coyote. It's been nearly five years, a vast majority approves, and both Killy and I are very comfortable with the form.
That's not the strange bit. The strange bit is that I hold off taking on the title of settled because I don't think I'm old enough/have had a wide enough variety of life experiences, but should I one day decide that yes, alright, coyote is irrevocably It...I will technically be right back where I was when I so cockily declared myself a settled coyote at fifteen.
Is that a blow to the older-settling-age theory? Was it just luck? Am I an exception to the standard rule? Is there simply too much variation to determine anything more than a rough period in which settling is more likely to happen? I still hold that we lack sufficient stable data to draw solid conclusions, but I can't help but wonder these things from time to time.
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I think there's a difference between being mostly one way and deciding that is, in fact, the way you want to be and "settling" into it and actually settling young, if that makes sense.
But I don't know. I am reluctant to say I'm settled either, because I can't tell if tomorrow I will feel like someone else. Even though I feel like the pieces that make up the "settling" part really did already settle.
I'm not sure how much 'want' factored into it, though I wouldn't be enormously surprised if it was a factor. I wanted to be a cat, or a bird, or a few other things throughout the years, but I kept bouncing back to coyote. There's also the fact coyote was suggested to me by Kibs via a (admittedly briefish) RA, so obviously something about me was pinging the form at fifteen.
Maybe it's just a combination of luck and stages? I was at a stage where my personality was roughly definable, and apparently roughly definable as a fairly well-known animal that had already been explored in some depth in the community. If my OTF had been something more along the lines of an obscure crab then perhaps I would have required more time and self-exploration and animal knowledge to pin it down, and thus not been able to settle until much later years.
But yeah, I dunno. We are the guinea pig generation of daemians.
I'm using "want" loosely, because I don't think it's a conscious process, but something that's inherent to a person, that makes them find one trait desirable over another, so much so that they end up working to become like that or managing to resist changing it even if their conscious brain thinks it's bad. There seem to be some people who never change their "ideal" from what it was when they were young?
Like, take a single trait, say... introversion. I tend to think everyone is born somewhere on the scale and don't really change the actual value. But those who are introverted are often criticized for their preference and depending on various other innate preferences, will choose one course of action or another. Some may try to be more extroverted, may even come to see themselves as "extroverted" even though that's not their default value, so their ideal and their reality might be considered unaligned in this case. And so as they grow older, they may start to realize that even though they would have described themselves as an extrovert in the past, they feel that does not fit the reality they have as that trait becomes more aligned and this is more preferable to whatever trait they were valuing over their preference for introversion, and so possibly two things that may have been out of alignment, though true at the time, click into place and become aligned, taking this fictional person one step towards being settled.
For some people, it's simpler, though, and they were introverted and they liked their introversion and described themselves that way and never decided to try out the other end. Being young, they would probably still have at least brief moments of "But maybe this is bad/not what I want?", which makes a person "unsettled." But in the end, they never really grew to feel that it was an inaccurate or (innately) undesirable trait, and so even as they grow up, introverted is a trait they feel is fitting. And thus they "settle" as an introvert.
Basically, what it seems like to me, is that (a lot of) people who "settle young" didn't actually, so much as manage to find a form that fit a lot of traits they would end up fully identifying with later when they really settled as a person. So for people who find a form that fits a lot of traits they identify with while they are young, the chances of being able to say "Yes, this is me" earlier is definitely a factor, but it's also possible to settle younger than the average and not know your form for years and years due to difficulties with animal interpretation, and it's also possible and even pretty likely that the form you think is fantastic and suits every bit of you when you are 17 and haven't tested out more permutations yet won't fit quite as much like a glove when you are 24.
Does that make sense?
That does make sense! Makes settling seem even more complicated than it already was, but it makes sense. So settling is (at least partially) separating desires and aspirations regarding personality from the actual inherent traits - or, as you say, finding alignment between what you want and what you got.
However, does that means any discontent with the self implies being unsettled? I'm not sure I know anyone who is 100% guaranteed to love every aspect of their own behaviour, even if they may sometimes seem to. If I should become frustrated with my habit of procrastination and actively strive to work around it, does that shake my coyote foundations, even if procrastination remains the trait I naturally swing towards when not consciously forcing myself to act against it?
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