What's YOUR Spirit Animal?

What if your spirit animal is just the first appropriately shaped toy you got as a child? A bear, an elephant. Maybe some kind of horribly misshaped creature thing or a deformed person.


Mine was a hydrocephalic panda bear with murder in his beady red eyes. He didn't scare me so much as he unnerved me so I kept him at the bottom of the the back of the closet.


What does that shit SAY about a person?


Sure, maybe you lucked out. Got some nice normal animal or some majestic beast of legend. What if you got a sock-monkey, the creepy anorexic perverts of the stuffed animal world? Or a neutered unidentifiable abomination-monster all in muted tones, without even felt claws or plastic eyes? Some wholesome yet mildly-disabled plant from Veggie-tales? How do you expect a cucumber to help you learn about your true self? Do you want some dead-inside goblin abortion thing to be the only thing between you and the dangers of the spirit world? Would YOU follow the floppy, lipstick-smeared face of a simian made from old clothes on the pathway to transcendence and miscellaneous other spiritual journeys? No. Don't get me started on those poor losers who got stuck with a special blanket for too long or a hand-me-down or, god forbid, some old action-figure their older brother left lying around that they got their hands on when not being watched by inattentive parents. I knew one kid whose first "toy" was a loofah.


I don't like to think what having a sociopathic bamboo-fetishist spirit animal means about me. I always liked my second toy better. It was a frog. When my mom bought him, he was full of walnut shells so she cut him open and stuffed him full of cotton. For years I figured I had a matching tadpole, but that was a lie I told myself to keep from feeling incomplete. Doesn't matter. He was a good frog. Completely non-anthropomorphized. Au natural, bebe.


I mean, these lifelong animist babysitters are supposed to show up either around birth or your coming of age ceremony and how many of you had a coming of age ceremony besides the ones that require akwards talks with your parents? I tell you this: at what passed for mine, I didn't see any animal. Just pain and self. I... kinda hope my spirit animal is "Pain"... but it would be kinda cool. Having "Self" as my spirit animal would be recursive and kinda cool. I would have the best hubris on the block. Envy of all the fallen priests and messiah-complex surgeons in the neighborhood.