Okay Besides The Deity Part... I Almost Fully Relate! I Don't Know If I Truly Know What Love, Like, Or

okay besides the deity part... i almost fully relate! I don't know if i truly know what love, like, or sexual desire really feels like. My caring and affection just have different levels. The whole world is like an intersectional identity, for me everything is totally separate but it all connects and i don't feel like i can fit into just one square of that grid but if i expand outside, others will move away.

uhmm maybe that doesn't make sense or maybe it does! either way i luv this post !

On Being "Socially Nonhuman"

One thing I've been mulling over lately...

I love how acceptance of physical nonhumanity is increasing now. I think it's very positive, and especially for those who experience clinical zoanthropy - so much support to you creatures!

Personally, I don't feel physically nonhuman at all. Not even in a figurative sense. My physical humanity has been a big part of my life's narrative, for better or worse - I've had plenty of trouble with species dysphoria in the past, but my path to healing has always been to recognise the joys in being human-bodied even if it doesn't reflect what I really am.

But the consideration - "oh, well, am I physically nonhuman?" - led me to a different idea that is just... sticking with me now, and I wanted to share it in case any other nonhuman folks relate. And also just for the sake of sharing, I need to do that more!

I'm physically human, but my nonhumanity feels... externally impactful on a level where I feel like referring to it as an "identity" alone is maybe a bit minimising.

This is because, far as I can tell, I just don't... act or feel in the way humans do?

The best examples of this are all absences.

I'm asexual, in the specific sense where I don't feel sexual attraction or desire at all, and never have. I genuinely cannot comprehend those experiences. This is pretty impactful and isolating all on its own.

But even more jarring is that I don't feel love in any conventional way. And I don't mean "just" romantic love - I mean any love at all. I don't love my friends, I don't love my family, I don't love my pets. This probably sounds horrible, but it's not! I can feel affection.

What separates my affection from "love" is that it's non-selective - I don't bond with specific individuals. A more palatable way to put this might be to say that I love my cat, but I love the neighbour's cat I see out the window just as much. But that feels reductive, because selectivity is a key part of what defines "love"! Can it be "love" if you feel it for everyone, whether you know them personally or not? Not really! It's a different thing.

And the other thing I'd say I'm distinctly lacking is, uh... survival instinct? Whatever drive pushes people (and animals) to keep going even when times are hard, even when things are desperate, on the hope that they'll make it to the other side. I don't experience that and I don't understand it (though, genuinely, I do wish I did).

Other ways I'm behaviourally inhuman are a bit subtler and harder to define. The way I think kinda throws people for a loop a lot - there are things that seem naturally intuitive to me, that other people genuinely struggle with. It's not a brag cause there's other things that are absolutely the reverse, ahah!

I guess, I thought it could be explained by neurodivergence for a while, but it all seems to run so much deeper than autism and ADHD could account for.

I have to mask myself to appear human. I have to mask any time I'm around other people, no matter how much I trust them, because I know trust only goes so far and there's some things I experience and feel that - to most people - are so "out there" that they'd just sound unhealthy.

There are things that are a normal part of my life that would be radically weird for most folks. This means I have to hide parts of my candid experience of life just to avoid uncomfortable attention or concern.

I don't like attention! I'm eccentric even when masking. The best I can do is "acceptably weird".

Fact of the matter is, you just can't live a safe, reasonable life while being open about the fact that your normal experience of the world is as a quasi-deity who became trapped in a human body by accident, who remembers the beginnings of life on Earth, who can sense the spirits of plants and animals, who peers through the layers of reality, and sometimes reacts to things before they happen. These things are all normal for me - there's no way I can be genuinely honest about myself while also "being human".

What it adds up to is that I feel viscerally nonhuman in a way that has a profound impact on my external life - yet still, I'm physically human. I am keenly aware of how my human brain impacts my way of thinking, how my human hormones affect how I feel.

So I'm not physically nonhuman, but I'm... socially nonhuman?

If you take "social" to encompass things like emotions and viewpoints and such, as well as how you talk and act?

My nonhumanity is socially impactful, and that impacts the physical (insofar as it impacts how I act, how I feel, and how I engage with the world).

It's an identity, yes, but it's not... self-contained. I can't really pass as "a normal person who happens to be nonhuman".

I doubt I'm the only one who experiences something like this! And that's part of why I'm even putting this out there. I don't exactly expect (or need) "socially nonhuman" to catch on as a term, but I wanted to say that this is how I feel, and that others who feel this way are not alone.

It can seem like a very lonely existence, I suppose. I don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable to express my genuine self around other people. Even online, I mask and hide. I would be seen differently if I didn't do that. Connection and belonging are fulfilling to me, and I value them too much to lose them just for the sake of being honest about stuff that most people wouldn't understand anyway!

Still, I don't really regret being nonhuman in this way. This is just who I am! I wouldn't be me if I were different.