I identify as bughearted, mainly because it's probably the right word for it. I border on cambitherian.
As long as I've known, I've cared for bugs as a subset of my care for animals. We as a system were always the one to call back in the day, and that didn't change as I came into my priority frontings. A moth, butterfly, cockroach, millipede, even spider was my game. I always took care to take them outside and put them in the grass where they belonged.
I loved to read about bugs, I wanted to own bugs. I cared and loved bugs more than others. I knew the feeling of excitedly presenting a caterpillar only to be faced with screams of fear. The constant demanding to be killed just because they looked different and were found in the wrong place. I empathised even if I didn't know why.
Alongside this, I was a prominent engager in giant tiny media through my own writings. I explored what it meant to be small in a large world through a thousand different lenses before finding out I had my own. I realised that I was in fact nonhuman, and the first kintype I confirmed almost immediately, was a tiny. This type has blossomed, I no longer call it a kintype but my anchor. I experienced life, love, and pain through the eyes of a tiny every day.
I identify as a borrower also, I watch and wait from the shadows. I admire humans, so different from me, from a crack in the wall. Accompanied by beetles and house moths. I feel genuine euphoria being small, it's where I belong - among blades of grass and grains of soil.
And maybe that's why coming back to bugs, my connection and affection to them became deeper. Because I now fully accepted that as a fellow miniscule being, and someone who experienced trauma, I knew how it felt. I knew how they felt - wandering in an enormous foreign world. Interacting with giant beings every day. Being ignored. Being belittled and lessened. Being stepped on.
If I was to be treated as invisibly tiny at least I would always have an insect beside me who knew my pain. There's a lot of pain and danger in the life of a bug. But there's always change. Metamorphosis.
I've come into a space of joy. I am proudly tiny, and I am proudly what I call "a small thing". And once I front in this body, I consider it my duty to protect other small things because I have knowledge of that existence. I have explored a hundred times the feeling a person gets when exposed to a massively larger creature. The fear, the awe, and the comfort.
At least now, I can stop my companions from suffering. I can be the kind hand so rare in this world. I can try my hardest to make my presence a home for insects which I love. Because I know that's all I'd want.
I would love you if you were a worm. I'd make you an enclosure and care for you. Because I am a bug too, even just in my soul and not in my form. I've become a bug, I've been made a bug, and I choose to be a bug. I choose to be your friend, you'll always have a place in my heart.