You’ve already noticed your morality is a bit off from most people’s, your sense of honour, even the way you think. It’s as if you’ve been culturally conditioned by some culture that doesn’t exist, and you’ve pretty much given up trying to explain it. You’ve read Jung. You’ve read mythology from just about every ancient culture about which you can dredge up texts. You’ve read piles of fantasy, and sometimes it makes you uneasy in ways you can’t define. You might know Otherkin, you might not. If you do, it’s all fine and dandy for them, you think. Some of them look at you funny and you think they whisper about you behind your back, but nobody outright tells you if they think you’re out of the ordinary.
And then one day, when the magic in your life is just right, you look in the mirror. And it flips you out, but it all makes sense. You look younger. Your features… are you tilting your head funny, or are they really angled like that? Why haven’t you noticed that before? Your hair may appear tinted slightly in some colour inexplicable by tricks of the light, but you’ll try and explain it that way anyway. But.. the ears. What the fuck is with the ears?
The moment will pass. Maybe it’ll take a few more of them before you start to consciously analyse it, even. But somewhere in the back of your brain, you’re thinking about it. You’re reevaluating your past, looking for the clues, looking for the behaviour that fits the myth and legend, going back in your life before you’d even heard of the legends you’re fitting into. The strings of luck, the attention you get, the strange looks from little children, it begins to fit in context. If you knew ‘kin before and you talk to them about it, they probably react without surprise. Over time, you find yourself being able to find your own and realise why no one was surprised at all — why didn’t you figure it out earlier?
You look in the mirror, again, when your life is stressed out, and you don’t see it. Nope. Rounded, human. Perfectly normal. It’s all on faith, now. Semi-blind faith that it’s not all a delusion, supported with behavioural research and propped up by the acceptance of others who believe the same. You decide maybe you’re just delusional. And then you decide it doesn’t matter, so long as your beliefs on the matter don’t hurt anybody, so long as you find yourself living those traits you want to encourage in this world. And another moment happens and you feel yourself undeniably Other, look in the mirror, just feel the breath in the trees. It cycles for years and you get used to it, to the point where you’ll simply answer your own doubts with “because I’m what I am, and that’s how it is,” wherever your mental state happens to be. You’ve Awakened.
And now you get to deal with it.