Beyond Awakening: The Care and Feeding of V.S. Nightborn

Our community places a lot of emphasis on our initial awakening. That defining moment where you realize you’re a Vampyre. Personally, I don’t believe awakening ever truly stops, we’re always on a journey of evolution and self discovery. Vampirism is deeply personal, subjective, and complex and there are so many different experiences that fit under the vampiric umbrella. I think the years following your initial awakening, the period where you’re experimenting, exploring, researching, and finding yourself, are even more formative and valuable than your initial ‘aha!’ moment. For folks early in the process, I encourage you to dig deep and really examine what’s going on for you and what all this means in your story. For vampires who have been around for a while, I encourage to revisit this time in your life and even share your story with folks who newer to the experience. The following is a personal reflection on my own vampirism, how I discovered my fae nature, the intersection between those two things, and the journey I took to figure it all out. 

I’m interested in making ‘Beyond Awakening’ a series of anecdotes from folks all over the community. If you’d like to be involved, hit me up!

 

I’ve been in the Greater Vampire Community  for about 20 years now, and think that, at this stage in my life, I have a pretty good rhythm and balance, and a solid understanding of my vampiric nature. I have my routines and I know the signs of being underfed and I can usually clock when something about my needs or routine needs to change, but that hasn’t always been the case. 

Getting to where I am has been a long, disorienting road. Navigating my nature, getting my needs met and trying to navigate the Online Vampire Community all at once was one hell of a ride, especially as an adolescent. My awakening began in 2003 at the age of 12 and I didn’t find my way to the GVC/OVC until 2005. I was young, and as such, much less sure of who I am and much more easily influenced than I am as an adult. I was new to both experiencing vampirism and the community. Ours is a community of strong opinions and even stronger personalities. That can make for some conflict, and it can also make for very firmly laid boundaries and firmly defended viewpoints. It wasn’t unusual, especially then, for websites, forums, or blogs to define vampirism in a very specific and limited way that didn’t leave room for other experiences or interpretations to be seen as legitimate. Other spaces worked hard to come up with a more general definition that included more experiences and people under the vampire umbrella, whether or not they were successful is not for me to judge. 

All this to say, as a teen, I was really struggling to make sense of what it all meant and how it related to what I was going through. What prompted my awakening and brought me to the community was an intense, deep hunger for blood, issues with sunlight, and an intense uptick in my psychic abilities. I wasn’t completely sure if these things were related, but according to many in the vampire community, they absolutely could be. This felt like a good place to start my journey. 

 

First Steps Along the Path

Finding a concise, clear, definition for vampire, in our community’s sense, was a bit difficult. I found a lot of people and places seeking to define it by what it is not instead of what it is. Dispelling myths and distinguishing what we are from the vampire of folklore or fiction. The community was also still very much navigating heavy conflict between sanguinarian and psychic vampire perspectives, further complicating my journey. I didn’t know it yet, but there were two main ideas in what a vampire was, and the two sides didn’t often agree or view the other as legitimate. 

In many of the communities I found myself in, the definition of vampire was someone who needed to take in human vital energy/life force/prana in order to maintain or improve their health and well-being. This was most often framed in terms of a condition, often likened to medical conditions and illness. Terms like “spiritual diabetes” were rather common. Vampires need energy to feel normal and healthy, and all vampires, no matter what, even sanguinarians, were really psychically feeding off the human vital energy/life force/prana, whether they realized it or not. The more I explored, the more I found communities that supported this perspective on vampirism, and within this perspective, it was frequently stated that the goal is or should be to stop blood drinking (often using the language or evolving out of it and frame blood drinking as rudimentary and unskilled) and learning to feed psychically and exclusively psychically. It would be one thing if this was primarily motivated by the huge amount of risk involved in blood drinking, and while folks did discuss that, it often felt more like it was being motivated by some sort of moral or existential superiority instead. There were some communities that held space for folks who drank blood and viewed the blood as a carrier for psychic energy, but their number seemed to be dwindling (and perhaps some of those communities were tightening up their gates and going underground, so to speak)  at this moment in time. 

Every so often, but with noticeably less frequency in my personal experience at that time, I would stumble upon websites and people who instead defined vampire as someone who needs to consume blood in order to improve or maintain their well being. These spaces seemed to be split between whether or not they needed that blood for spiritual/psychic reasons or physical/biological ones, but all maintained that blood drinking was the definitive characteristic of the vampire.

It seemed to me that the dominant narratives of the day were that all vampires were truly psychic vampires feeding on life force energy, no matter what the method, and that vampirism was to be viewed and experienced like an illness or a condition. To be fair, many vampires are very sickly people, especially when un fed, but that doesn’t apply universally across the board—not that I truly knew that at the time. There was also a pretty large group of folks who were pretty reluctant vampires, resentful of their nature and would cure it if they could choose to. Though there are definitely also plenty of folks who wouldn’t change their vampiric nature for the world even if it was a hardship for them.

It wasn’t unusual at all for me to encounter communities or individuals of either perspective that were openly hostile to the ‘other side’. It wasn’t uncommon for folks to insist that the other viewpoint of vampirism wasn’t real or legitimate and that only vampires that aligned with their viewpoint deserved to call themselves “vampires” at all. These conversations were frequently heated and unkind, they often seemed to have the goal of pushing the other viewpoint out of the community. It seemed to be a commonly held belief that vampires of all sorts had big personalities and abrasive natures, and that the butting of heads was simply a byproduct of that. As a young person trying to figure out where I belonged, but not wholly identifying with either side, I was lost and afraid, but desperately in need of support and resources.

 

The Awkward Teen Phase

I was drowning in a mix of very confusing experiences and behaviors. Sometimes I felt like a psychic vampire who was feeding on human vital energy with energy tendrils to maintain and improve my well being, especially my mental, spiritual, and magical well being. While energy feeding, I felt like I got more out of sleep, I was having more vivid dreams, was able to accomplish more magic and energy work (which I was only just really starting to practice and explore at the time), my mental health was more positive, and I had an overall sense of being balanced and whole. While I was more much sickly as a young child, (I very nearly died as an infant, my birth story is horrifying, my family is shook everyone survived), by the time I reached adolescence, I wasn’t particularly sickly, and found that I often had a strong immune system and healed very well compared to my peers. Not relating to the sickly part, despite feeling like I needed to take in huge amounts of energy to fully regulate myself, was often a big factor that created a lot of doubt about if I was a psychic vampire at all. What I did relate to was a sense that I needed more energy than my body was making naturally, and a lot of psychic activity, abilities, and magical experiences from a very young age that shifted into high gear in my tweens. Energy Feeding came naturally to me, was often instinctual, and made a huge difference in my daily functioning. 

Sometimes, however, I felt like a sanguinarian, no matter how much energy feeding I did, my craving and taste for blood never went away— though I did spend quite a great deal of time trying to ignore and suppress it. Years of my life spent fighting it or explaining it away, convincing myself that it shouldn’t still be that loud because I was well fed on energy. The hunger, however, was so much that it would often keep me awake at night, no matter how much physical food I ate or human vital energy I took in psychically. Being around someone who was bleeding was incredibly difficult for me. The smell alone was enough to be a distraction and I would quickly find myself salivating and my heart rate increasing. I would always have to excuse myself from the room, earning me a reputation of being incredibly squeamish. In addition to blood and hunger, the sun and light sensitivity persisted, and I had an inverted sleep rhythm, which are commonly reported by many blood drinking vampires. 

Having avenues to explore sanguinarianism and blood consumption were a lot trickier for so many reasons—the obvious and incredible amount of risk, and my age at the time being the major barriers. My age alone kept me from most of the resources I would really need over time, though I was grateful to find a small handful of vampire community websites that had teen centric spaces. Most notably, Vampires of Eternal Night (VOEN, later TrueForm Within) was initially teen run, and always had a bit of a teen section available, and Sanguinarius.org had a small teen section for folks 17 and up. 

Most of the time, I tried to be really responsible about exploring this side of myself, most of the time. I was a teenager after all. My earliest experiences with drinking blood were definitely happening in my teenage years. They were complicated for sure. I was a really anxious kid, so fear of getting sick from someone’s blood was always a huge fear of mine. My boyfriend at the time would occasionally offer me his blood, and while it was so incredibly tempting, I would usually push myself to refuse. He was already my psi donor and well aware of the awakening I was going through, it would be so easy to give in, but I held strong and stayed responsible. Until of course, my high school started doing blood drives. Once I found out that the Red Cross tests all blood donations (and notifies any donors who test positive for anything), I eventually caved, and let him donate to me on rare occasion, when the hunger got really bad. My first few tastes were simply that, small tastes of small cuts, often accidental in nature (the cuts that is, the feeding itself was always intentional). 

I have no problem admitting that I enjoy the sensory experience of consuming blood, something that was pretty taboo in many of the spaces I was in at the time. I like the taste and feel of it, especially directly from a person, but what really shocked me, the more I explored it, was the more I felt physically stronger and healthy. I had an easier time digesting food, which I didn’t realize I was struggling with a bit until it stopped, and to my surprise, I felt like I handled pain and injury so much better. I wasn’t having headaches in the periods of time I was drinking blood. Most interestingly,  around the time I had my first experiences with blood drinking, I also pretty seriously injured an ankle. When I was actively drinking blood, that ankle wouldn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, until it was time to feed again. Something that holds true to this day, my chronic pain that I have developed as an adult almost goes away entirely when I’m well fed, though as I age, I find it lingers more, though I wonder if that would change if I was able to consume more blood, but I digress. 😅

I did try to do the responsible thing and see a doctor. Nothing ever came up as medically out of the ordinary. Any blood tests I had, no matter what the context, came back clear. I saw a nutritionist and other doctors for years as a teen and they could never make sense of my insane sense of hunger. 

Reaching Adulthood 

By the time I reached age 18, I had experimented so much and yet felt as if I was no closer to understanding what I need and in what way I might be a vampire. Psychic energy feeding helped me feel well and strong in some ways, but blood feeding helped me feel well and strong in entirely different ways. I did know that I always felt best when I was doing both. If I were to psi feed without drinking blood—which I often had to do because blood is so hard to access, especially as a teen, the hunger would persist, and  my physical health wouldn’t feel like it was where I knew it could and should be. If I was drinking blood without psi feeding, my mental and spiritual/energetic health would drop. For me, more often than not I didn’t identify much with the narrative of a sickly vampire. I didn’t truly feel like I was running a deficit and that feeding helped bring me up to a baseline that was comparable or normal for most people around me. I felt more like my need to feed brought me to a level of functioning and well-being that was beyond a more standard baseline. (Navigating that feeling has been challenging for sure. It’s taboo in many spaces, though in some spaces it is the norm, and unfortunately in others, that sort of narrative is abused and misused for cruelty in a way I really do not appreciate or identify with). Even if I never got to the point of being ill without either (The older I get, though, I do notice more apparent consequences of not feeding—especially for blood— and how much I need to take in or how frequently I need to feed does increase, but that’s an article for another day), I knew I needed to be feeding in order to be at my best, I had seen it. I just didn’t feel like myself or like I was in proper alignment on any level if I tried to stop feeding at all (which did prove difficult, my system almost always started subconsciously psi feeding when I refused to take it actively.)

With a few years of exploration under my belt, I found it harder and harder to exist in online community spaces. I questioned myself, my needs, my nature a great deal, especially since I really couldn’t relate to the narrative of vampirism always being an illness or marked by a sickly nature for everyone. It just didn’t ring true to my experience, but so much else did, it didn’t seem correct to disqualify me from being a vampire only on those grounds. Even when I was more assured in my nature as a vampire, I spent a lot of time engaging in community spaces in a way where I wasn’t being fully open about the complexity or reality of my nature that I experienced. Years of my life spent pretending to only psi feed in some forums, while pretending to only blood feed in others. Years more genuinely confused and not knowing which one I needed or why, (or if I really do need both instead of just wanting or liking both) trying to only do one and swear off the other, especially since the dominant community narrative at the time that vampirism is all the same thing and what folks are really feeding on, whether they are blood drinkers or not, is that psychic life force energy. 

Hybrid Theory 

Another perspective was starting to emerge more and more during this time, hybrid vampires. These seemed to be a bit more variation into how this term was defined and who exactly it applied to. The short of it, is vampires who were feeding on both on physical blood and psychically feeding on human vital energy. For some, this was because they viewed them as interchangeable. They could do either/or—sometimes preferring one but being able to substitute the other. For others it was because they fundamentally saw themselves as (and sometimes, by extension, all vampires)  psychic vampires and viewed blood as a carrier for human vital energy—what they were truly feeding on. Others still, like myself, believed that blood and energy were fundamentally different things that served different purposes and had different results. This seemed to be the minority opinion, especially at the beginning. 

From the greater community, I saw lots of debates on if hybrids were legitimate, lots of “pick a side” discourse, and even the notion that hybrids might be a secret different third thing instead of vampires at all. There were a lot of loud voices stating that hybrids just liked both methods but didn’t actually need both. According to many, Vampirism is about what you need, right? It started to feel a lot like anti bisexual discourse, with hybrids being framed as greedy and attention seeking in some spaces. Even in some communities that seemed to welcome hybrids, they were occasionally given their own discussion area (which is a plus), but were not allowed to participate in sanguinarian only discussion areas or psychic vampire only discussion areas (not so plus). For me, this created a sense of isolation and a lack of community and resources. While it was good having the support of others under the hybrid umbrella, there were often so few of us in any given space that there wasn’t much discussion going on, and there weren’t as many resources going around or support to be had. 

Around this time, I was starting to receive feedback from other communities that only created more confusion for me. In hybrid spaces, trying to share the full scope of my experience wasn’t always fruitful. I was often met with “well how do you know you need blood for physical reasons, how do you know you’re not just psi feeding off the exchange and that you feel like you need both because a blood exchange produces a particular flavor of energy you prefer over others? 

To be fair, I didn’t truly know, and I explored this angle for years of my life, and I’m very grateful for having done so. I have so much insight into the flavors of energies I prefer, which ones I hate, and which ones I can work with and refine into something tastier, so to speak. And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the energy of a blood exchange sometimes, it really depends on what the donor is getting out of the experience. For example, if a donor is aroused and excited from the blood exchange, I will gladly energy feed off that, and that will sate my energetic needs. (That’s my preference honestly, to be able to get it all at once, blood, sex, and human vital life force energy.) But if the experience is neutral, or nervous (consensual donors can absolutely still get a bit of ‘stage fright’ about the process, especially at first) the energy doesn’t do it for me. That soft, cozy, “helping a friend” energy usually doesn’t quite do it for me either, but I can refine that into something useful if I so please. 

I am now experienced enough in energy work to know when I am taking in energy, whether I am actively or passively doing so. I can feel it moving in and around my body and I can feel my system processing it, and the after effects are very obvious as well. It’s possible for me to drink blood from someone without actively drawing energy from them to any large degree, though I do find that most types of intimate touch do trigger small contact energy feeds, but the amount is nowhere near enough to sustain that part of my need. I know I’m not just energy feeding on the blood exchange, and even still, I know that the result and impact of a blood exchange are different than the impacts and results of an energy exchange, and combining them are different still. And a few years after this, I would learn that animal blood would still work for me, it would produce the same benefits as human blood, though admittedly it does seem to take more of it to have the same degree of impact. Animal blood is not my preferred means of sanguinary feeding, but it absolutely does make a big difference for me compared to no blood consumption at all. But many vampires I know who are feeding on the energy of the blood, claim that animal blood does absolutely nothing for them, which absolutely tracks if the life force energy is what they are truly feeding on. So for me, I know blood does something for me and my body, not just the energy that may or may not be present.

 

Gaining Nuance and Redefining Need

In psychic vampire spaces, I was exploring different possible reasons or causes for that part of my vampirism, trying to figure out where I stand. I seemed to have the high energy need and requirement I have heard many talk about, especially those who identified with the Kheprian Priest archetype as laid out in the Psychic Vampire Codex (though, most of the spaces I was in at the time, didn’t have too many people that identified with that part of the PVCPsychic Vampire Codex but I didn’t usually have experience the intense medical health crashes described in that archetype, though I did relate to the ‘one foot on each side of the veil’ experiences, and I do experience an intense degree of psychic abilities and natural magic use and will working. 

The image of the sickly vampire just didn’t feel completely true for my experiences, and my vampirism itself never really felt like an illness, injury or condition of its own, even if that was the narrative many around me expected me to have or experience. To me, my vampirism (of both varieties)  felt less like a disease, and more like a natural obligate diet, I needed to feed the way the a human needs to consume food, not the way a human might have to take medication for an illness or to ease pain. That said, if a person is not consuming any food at all, the results can be severe, and so it is when I’m not feeding at all. I spent a 3 year period severely neglecting my vampiric nature on both ends, trying to convince myself (largely due to community attitudes about what defines a “real vampire” vs someone who just learned to or enjoys feeding) that maybe I wasn’t a vampire at all, and my overall well-being has never been so poor in my life. I am most certainly a vampire 🤣

Feeling like I had ruled out possible explanations like Kheprian energy body alteration, and spiritual injury or illness, I explored other explanations for my vampirism—especially my psychic vampirism. The idea of having a high energetic or spirits metabolism seemed to be the most likely for me, I was burning through and using up way more energy than my body was making. I am a witch and will worker, I have a family history of psychic abilities, many of which began manifesting in me as a toddler and have only increased in intensity as I’ve aged, all of this supported that idea for me. I’m doing a lot, naturally, instinctively, as well as actively, so it made sense that I’m burning through and relating to energy differently. I remember listening to an interview with M. Belanger where they said, “they are people who are very psychic. From an early age they have an awareness of this energy. They’re sensitive to the emotional state of others, they are sensitive to the peaks and valleys of the energy around them and they are tuned, very particularly to the vital energy of living human beings”. This really resonated with me and my experiences so far. In this same interview, they also mention that a lot of blood drinkers believe they are feeding on a material component in the blood, not a psychic or energetic one. It felt like so much validation at once. I made a point to dig deeper in their work beyond just the PVC. 

At this same time, I was in Lady CG’s forums having quite a lot of feelings about my experiences with blood and blood drinking and the way it affects me and how that effect is so different from energy feeding. This was one of the spaces where I felt like I could speak openly about my experiences as both. And I remember the day when Lady CG chimed in and said, “There is nothing wrong with you. Your experiences sound to me like you might be a perfectly healthy, young sanguinarian.” I would go on to explore her book as well, and it was a big game changer for me. It was nice to see a sanguinarian source with practical advice, but one that also didn’t shy away from psychic abilities, magic, and woo. I felt like I was getting so much validation both internally and externally that all aspects of my vampirism were very legitimate and very likely not completely intertwined. 

 

There’s Always a Secret Third Thing

One possible explanation for vampirism that I had seen floating around the community for years was the idea that some people are vampires or developed psychic vampirism because their soul, spirit, and/or energy body originated from some place other than earth or in some species other than human. These people are otherkin types who have a spiritual shape that doesn’t quite align well with a human body, or is unable to process or produce its own human vital energy, so they need to take from other humans around them. I never could get the idea out of my head, it would pop back up occasionally over the span of 15 years. I often had inklings if not being exactly or particularly human, but I couldn’t quite sort out in what way. 

I briefly tried on the therian label, I identified with a few animals to a degree, wolves, ravens, and deer but like if deer were predators. In dreams or astral travel, I would frequently shape shift, or take a form that was a humannoid that shared physical traits of all 3 of those animals. I eventually realized that I didn’t fully fit into that community or their experiences, but I was likely having an otherkin experience of some variety. 

At the very beginning of my vampiric awakening, I stumbled across the elven and fae communities and was oddly drawn to them, but when I tried to engage with their communities, my experiences were never much like the people I spoke to in those groups, so I simply wrote it off. I encountered a lot of people who had strong identities as nature spirits or who heavily identified with Tolkien elves or believed they were sent from the stars. They often also saw their true selves as have a supernatural but traditional beauty. Many of them were also on this overly sanitized ‘love and light’ wavelength that never rang true to me. I’ve been more of a comfort in the dark type who thrived in liminal spaces. At the time, I wasn’t well acquainted with traditional/cultural fae folklore or how broad a category ‘fae’ truly was and how many beings it included or how unsettling or uncanny and intense those beings could be. Far from the love and light twee types I met online.  That would come over a decade later.  The experience I aligned with the most at the time was that of the vampire, so that was the community I immersed myself in. 

After over 15 years of the notion of both fae energies and vampirism possibly stemming from atypical soul origin in the back of my mind, I met someone who was fae. She really opened up my worldview to what that could mean and I went on a long journey to familiarize myself with fae folklore, especially the darker stuff. I was curious if there was something out there that aligned with any of my spiritual and vampiric experiences. After a few years of reading and study, and ton of journey, dream, and trance work alongside it, I eventually stumbled upon the Baobhan Sith, a Scottish fairy being that was also vampiric in nature. Not only that, but they would shape shift, frequently shifting into ravens and crows, and having hooves instead of human feet. Their folklore spoke of seducing men, often dancing them nearly to death, before draining them of all their blood to sustain themselves. This felt like a good fit, it felt like home, like breathing. For me, it accounted for all the things I felt like I never had good answers for, and the ways I might be different from a more typical type of vampire. 

Being Baobhan Sith, I’ve come to understand my vampiric natures and my fae nature as all being intertwined, they are essentially the same thing, or part of the same bigger picture. I can never know for certain, but I am certainly open to the idea that being Baobhan Sith could be part of a reason why my physical body needs blood. I am also open to the idea that those two things could be totally unrelated. I don’t know if it’s possible to know for sure. 

 

The Med Sang Connection 

Around the same time I was exploring my fae/baobhan sith nature, I encountered a new wave of voices in and around the vampire community. After years of either being pushed aside or voluntarily withdrawing for their own safety, the strong sanguinarian contingent I once saw at the very beginning of my journey, the one that viewed vampirism as about being primarily about blood and blood drinkers needing something physical in the blood was coming back in full force. This time, with a large pocket that were calling themselves Med Sangs (shirt for medical sanguinarian). They were much more open about themselves and their resources than they had been in my prior experience. 

When I needed it most, I often found that many sanguinarian communities were a bit locked down and weary of outsiders as well as folks who psi fed or believed in energy at all. Rightfully so, given so much of the attitudes I was seeing at the time. I hold no resentment, and it all worked out for me eventually. But now I had access to way more blood related information than I have ever had before.  That’s not to say there was absolutely no blood information in the community when I was coming up, it was often just restricted to adults only spaces I was too young for at the time, and by the time I came of age, it was fading away—either pushed out in favor of a “we’re all psychic vampires so no one needs this anymore” worldview or being carefully guarded in small, heavily vetted communities. 

 A lot of this med sang stuff really made sense to me, so much of my experiences, and theories, were reflected in their materials, and part of me is still very curious to see if vampirism is something that will ever be seriously studied by science and medicine, but I was also have such strong psychic, magical, and now otherkin woo woo experiences that I knew I was a major outlier for that community. I mostly admired from a distance, though there was a brief period where I did jump back in pretty full force to “sang only” mode. Just a brief period, though, I quickly realized it wasn’t sustainable, and was only hurting me to not embrace my full truth. The amount of woo going on in my life is a big part of why I don’t fit cleanly into any space, especially when it comes to things like the med sang community. My experience is so far outside their scope, and yet, so much of my I experience in terms of my blood needs is very much like theirs and their resources have been life saving for me. Their resources even gave me a really valuable term to describe myself: sanguivore. 

According to the Red Cellar, sanguivores are: 

Blood-drinkers who are perceived to be biologically alike. They may identify as med sang, vampire, sanguinarian, or anything in between which makes it somewhat confusing. Sanguivores need a significant quantity of blood. They may require at least one pint of fresh blood per month, often more. Sanguivores often become very sick with prolonged exposure to heat and sun, with vomiting and loss of consciousness not uncommon. Fatigue and a weakened immune system following sun exposure has been reported. Nocturnal sleep cycles are not uncommon either (I personally was diagnosed with ‘delayed sleep phase syndrome’). Sanguivores have also been reported to have a very strong immune system with many rarely catching infectious diseases; this flips and the immune system crashes without blood for a very long time. High muscle density is found in some sanguivores. Anecdotes also show that saliva of a sanguivore on an open wound during feeding can delay clotting time. Accelerated wound healing and a colder, logical personality is something I’ve witnessed/experienced in addition to the above. Digestion of regular food can be difficult for some, particularly if adequate blood intake is not maintained. A sanguivore may view their condition in any number of ways, including some not commonly known identities choosing to publicly identity as ‘sanguivore’ for convenience’s sake.

 

Ding ding ding. All the above applies, and there is room for me to not necessarily be a true med sang. Sometimes, when speaking to community folks, I will use the term med sang as short hand to get the point across that I am not drawing life force energy from the blood I drink and that animal blood and cooked blood are effective for me. When I have the time and energy to go into more depth with folks I can explain more, but more often than not, I refer to myself as a sanguivore and I usually mention that it may or may not be a facet of my faerie nature as baobhan Sith, but all that is a mouthful, and that is before I get into psychic feeding too 😅

 

The Balancing Act

Over time, I would encounter or become aware of a small handful of folks who identified as both vampiric and fae (some of them specifically as faerie creatures with inherently vampiric natures, others as people who believe their nature as faeries in human bodies are why they need to take in extra energy). At least one of those people is a VVC member. I’m not alone in my experiences, no matter how much it felt that way for most of my journey

I am working on being more open with the community about the unique nature of my experience and not feeling shame for it. So much of my early journey was filled with shame which lead to doubt. There is absolutely a healthy amount of doubt to have in these communities, I find a certain degree of doubt necessary for growth and exploration, but I was experiencing shame to a degree that impeded growth. And it was shame that drove me to try to hide parts of myself in different facets of the community as I figured my shit out. 

Even today, I still have that impulse to separate out what parts of my nature I discuss in which spaces. In magic and energy work heavy spaces I typically only discuss my psychic vampirism, and in more med sang oriented spaces or spaces with a heavy biology or physical body lean, or even just spaces with more blood drinkers present. I usually only discuss my sanguivore nature. 

After more than a decade of trial and error, self exploration, community engagement, doing my best at my own research and an epic fuck ton of shadow work, the conclusion I’ve reached is this: There is more than one type of vampiric nature, experience, or condition and there are multiple different explanations for why someone might need go take in outside energy, or why someone might feel a deep need to consume blood. I view all of it, so long as we are not doing harm, as legitimate even if I don’t necessarily experience or identify with every single thing. All those explanations can coexist easily and they do not take anything away from each other. Not only that, but I believe that I experience more than one type of vampirism simultaneously. I am both a sanguivore and a psychic vampire and those two experiences and needs don’t exactly cross over or work together with one another. I consider myself to have a high need for both sources. Personally,  I don’t view my vampiric nature as an illness, injury, or condition. I do not believe I have leaky energy centers or struggle to produce enough of my own energy (though, those are absolutely legitimate explanations for vampirism in many many people). For me, I’ve come to the conclusion that I burn through a lot of energy and need more than a human body naturally produces because my energy body shape doesn’t always align perfectly with my physical body shape. In terms of blood, I view my blood need as being very physiological and relating to my physical body instead of my energy body. 

I know my nature and experience is far from universal, but I don’t believe I’m the only one like me either. And I hope putting my experiences into words help others think a bit more intensely about their own journey. Vampirism of any degree is complex. It can be tough to wrap your head around. My particular nuances may not make sense to everyone and may be tough to understand, others still may not give a fuck at all about any of what I’ve said here, and all of that is okay with me. I am grateful for the complicated nature of my journey so far.

After a long, hard journey, I feel like I have a really good grasp on my needs, my feeding, and my understanding of vampirism as a whole. I have personally grown to believe and accept that there are lots of different types of vampirism out there and lots of different reasons to need or be motivated to engage in vampiric feeding of any type. There aren’t necessarily any universal truths that apply to every single vampire, but I do see a lot of patterns or large groups with many common experiences and traits. I have grown very comfortable with the fact that not everyone is going to view my experience as legitimate or vampiric. I also may not see every single person who claims to be vampiric as falling under my personal definition of vampirism. I think there is room for all of us under the umbrella. Vampirism is a wide spectrum of extremely varied and often really subjective experiences. There is more than one type of vampiric nature or expression. The finer details or how legitimate other people view my experiences are less important to me than building community, support, and common ground and similar experiences with others in the vampire community. Meeting others like me and being able to share knowledge, support, and practical  techniques is much more important to me than semantics or what differences might exist between us and how we tick. I just wish I had come up in communities that held more space for me to come to that conclusion sooner.