mostly i am writing about this because i have personal experience in this regard and i think it's fascinating as hell and maybe if you have your own supernumerary limb experiences you should contact me somewhere (possibly including (and this is a stretch) something linked on my links page what an idea) and i will be excited to hear you talk about it (but please don't just open with "hi" i will literally light your house on fire)
"supernumerary phantom limb" is a cumbersome (though seemingly standard) term for phantom sensation in limbs that never existed. this is in distinction to regular phantom limbs which are felt after the removal of an existing limb (as in the case of amputees). this particular post is mainly interested in supernumerary phantom limbs of animal features because (surprising to nobody) i have my own experience with this
there is other cool stuff with respect to this subject : in particular i am aware of trans people having phantom genitals in alignment with their identities - but this post is not the time!
this is not an informational article. if you are here to research something : that's cool as fuck but don't expect too much. this is largely anecdote / no / it's entirely anecdote / and it's totally unverifiable
the first time i remember sensing a phantom tail was in kindergarten (age 5). i was walking around the track before school and i simply just. knew something was there. i could feel it and i was able to (with great mental effort) move it myself. i checked and determined that [no. you can't touch it with your hand. you fucking dolt]. for some reason, despite knowing logically there's nothing there, i felt like~ embarrased... about it. and i tried to hide it behind my backpack (somehow unsuccessfully, in my mind. obviously it didn't matter, nobody could see it anyways. for obvious reasons)
i would continue to have similar experiences every 2 weeks or so but i would try to just bury it in the back of my mind. this was until i randomly caught a short glimpse of it in my peripheral vision. this is not a normal thing to have happen, i think! i have always hallucinated silly things in my peripherals, though, so i wrote it off as just something that happens, i guess. (it has just occurred to me how odd it is that i am revealing this for the first time ever in a blog post. oh well). i can't fucking draw so i'll just say that it looked like the tails on the imp characters from helluva boss but the tip was a vaguely pinkish color with the rest being a dull purple
after having seen it, i stopped trying to bury it in my mind. "this is an experience i am having and i should probably stop trying to pretend i am not", i told myself (in my mind (much less eloquently (i was like 7))), apparently oblivious to the fact that i was pretending i wasn't having certain other experiences. the phantom sensations became more frequent (several times per week) throughout the rest of elementary school (5-11 -ish years of age). then middle school hit
middle school is really funny because it consists of a bunch of kids who are either just before or just after getting pumped full of hormones and think they know things. one of the things i thought i knew is that furries are bad. i was fairly dedicated to this belief. unfortunately this belief was pretty much directly contradictory to the experience of "i literally experience a tail on my body as often as daily" and i once again attempted to bury it in my mind. i was more successful this time, and throughout middle school i only felt the tail a handful of times
BAM covid and then BAM highschool and now everyone's fucked up and i have never been more ready to put these new beliefs i developed explicitly to contradict my parents' beliefs to the test. the teenage-rebellion belief-thing i developed during this time which applies to this story was that "hey maybe furries are fine actually". it turns out this one is pretty effective. it's way easier to not hate people than it is to hate people. having had this belief validated for myself, it still took some time for that phantom tail i'd remembered having to return. in fact, i did not experience it for my entire freshman year. but then, sometime during sophomore year, i began feeling it again. frequently and vividly. i would feel it moving around and hitting stuff behind me in response to however i was feeling and i frequently felt it wrap around table and chair legs. sometimes i would literally turn around and prepare to catch an object i thought my tail had hit and knocked off a table - this is hilarious now but it was really frustrating when it started happening. i could tell this tail was different than before. longer / thicker / more sensitive. i should pivot to just writing innuendos all day long. it wouldn't be until mid-junior-year that i would see it in my periphery again. it seems to be around 4 feet (~1.2 meters) to the end of the main portion, with the extreme end another foot or so beyond that. this tail is very visually reminiscent of the one on emma essex's mayhem, but with added highlights mostly forming chevron shapes. for some reason, the color of these highlights changes throughout my waking cycle, starting mid-dark blue upon waking up, getting to be bright blue sometime around 6 hours after waking up, and transitioning slowly to pink and then purple as my "day" (more on this in the future) winds up. this is the tail that i sense still
i now feel the tail about as often as not. for a little while i was able to move it into my vision and get short glimpses of it in my peripheral vision but i can't do it without breaking the sensation anymore
i realize this is a weird thing to be admitting on the internet, i would say "please don't be weird about this" but actually that's fine. go ahead and be weird about this i can take it