awakening

I was born into vampirism, and it's hard for me to every remember not feeling "different". I haven't come to terms with this (though I knew inside) until fairly recently.

I've had several experiences where my vampirism has been so obvious to me that it (figuratively) slapped me in the face, but I denied it.

Vampirism is not really something that's easy to accept. You don't want to have all the disadvantages, and as eccentric as I am =), sometimes I just want to be mundane without all the complications. But life often doesn't work that way.

I had always been interested in "vampires" (I have quotes because I mean Hollywood vampires), but always felt for some reason "That's not the way it is!", even though I really had no basis for the statement, I felt it inside. I've read the books, seen the movies, heards the myths...

I had always kind of played around with the idea in my head,

but I never really took it seriously. I mean, vampires are fake, right? It's kind of ironic now considering I'm mythical and all. *wink* But what I did know for sure is that I was different. I wasn't human. I didn't know exactly what I was, but I felt with the depth of my heart and soul that I wasn't the same as the masses. Some could say that everybody likes to think like that. That it's the inner desire of every person to feel special and think that they're "different". But when you don't want to be different but are, it's a different story. None of us asked to be this way. It wasn't a choice.

Anyway, I also knew I was different and I that I had what I'd come to know as the symptoms of something. I just didn't know that what I am is a vampire. So, if you define an awakening by developing the symptoms and it kind of hits you fairly suddenly, then I was born awakened. I have always had these "symptoms". But if you consider realization and admittance of my nature as awakening, then I have awoken only a short time ago. It all happened quite by accident it seems: I knew I was moving down to St. Louis so I began looking up St. Louis stuff. For some reason that's beyond me I entered "St. Louis" AND "Vampire" in the search and one of the first sites it pulled up was St. Louis After Dark. Originally, I was turned off by looking at the site - these people actually thought they were vampires! I thought it was a scam or they were crazy or in some cult. But I kept turning the thought of vampirism over and over in my head until I couldn't bear it anymore. Intrigued I went there started and reading, giving a "Couldn't be..." But I kept reading the articles, and stumbled upon the "Dark Links". The links that were on that page led me to many excellent resources with links of their own. St. Louis is called the "Gateway to the West". For me it was, SLAD specifically, the gateway to discovery and truth. No, this isn't meant as a ruthless plug of SLAD, but these have been my experiences.

Intrigued, I wanted to see why exactly they all thought they were different from the typical run-of-the-mill person. So, of course, I looked to the symptoms and "how do I know if I'm a vampire?" pages. I was shocked at how many of the symptoms I had. But I got to thinking, what if I had layed out what all my symptoms before looking at it. Won't anybody who looks at it go "Yeah, I kinda do that" (even though my answers were more like "holy shit! Exactly!")? However, I remembered thinking about those very symptoms before I had ever tripped upon the SLAD site. Too many things were the same for it to be merely coincidence or suggestion.