swanblood:
montbear:
fullpoop:
montbear:
life itself is wonderful
being a human being with the ability to feel emotions of joy, and have curiosity and wonder, and to learn and to go outside and make friends, and even sit inside and be on tumblr
it’s wonderful
we may not have superpowers, we may have stress and problems, we may not be anything exotic or exciting, we may not be the prettiest of animals, we may bring a lot of disaster to the world
but we have minds, creativity, emotions and the ability to express ourselves
why on earth would you want to be something other than human
why would you want to pretend to be something that doesn’t exist
do you just not feel special or loved or unique enough? do you not want the reality you live in? do you not realize how great it is to be a person, despite the problems we bring to the world? are you just that misanthropic?
being a human is what leads you to believe these things in the first place, you know.
hey. i identify as nonhuman — and that’s the first time i’ve ever really, directly mentioned that on this blog, so goodbye to my followers i guess — and you know what? i fucking love humans. their minds, their bodies, are fascinating and beautiful and i want to learn everything about them. everything about me. because, yeah, i’m human. and i know that it’s a privilege — a blessing, even — to be so.
but that doesn’t stop the heartache i feel when i look up at the mountains, or the nausea that swirls in my stomach when i realize how wrongly big my body is, how my legs and feet are shaped the wrong way, how my skull isn’t small and fragile and sloped.
i can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it’s not about misanthropy or escapism. it’s about what i feel in my heart and my soul. and that’s it.
here’s an honest question and i really want you to think about this
if you did not have the internet, like, the internet was never made and you never ever had it, would you still believe this about yourself?
if human beings were still primitive in nature, i.e. not as technologically advanced (see: african tribesman, native americans, hell even puritan colonial america), would you still feel you are something other than human?
I have been feeling nonhuman since before I could talk, so, yes.
If there was a simple, “just look outside and smell the flowers!” answer for who we are, we would have found it by now. We really would.
When you say, “why on earth would you want to be something other than human”, that shows clearly that you don’t know what it’s like to feel the body dysphoria, you don’t know what it’s like to cringe inside when people look at you because you know they think of you as human.
We know that we can do many things as human. If we want something else so badly, even though that is true, then there must be a very good reason for it.
It is funny this came up today. After a comment on the radio today where someone mentioned ‘I’d rather be a hamster, that just looks like an easy life!’ I thought ‘I am not at war with human culture and human society and human ways of being. It is not easier to call myself a bat.’ But I am at war. And I wanted to write about that.
First, it’s true some otherkin don’t really put their feelings into coherent words until finding out there are other people experiencing the same things through the internet. They are few, but they exist. Why should that invalidate them?
I had words and ideas and all sorts of thought about being bat and human before I found the otherkin community, but I rarely spoke about it back then, which is nearly ten years ago now. Back then, it was something quietly expressed in stories, and kept to myself the rest of the time. Occasionally I’d speak with my mother about it, but she would say things like, ‘No, that’s not possible. You cannot feel these things.’ Or because she was of a spiritual lean she would tell me, ‘People cannot have the souls of animals, because we only have the souls of what we are.’ And that was upsetting as a child because I had these feelings I was struggling to understand but no one would take them seriously and work with me to help me understand.
Finding the otherkin community did give me permission later in my life to express and work with being bat and human, instead of hiding it. And that has been a positive influence. I’ve tried and failed to suppress and change the aspects of myself I call ‘bat’ (I can go into detail elsewhere, if you like). That has done nothing positive. Working with it, celebrating it, trying to understand it has. I’m more functional, I’m happier, I enjoy life. And I enjoy being a human person who is also a bat person a lot more than I once did. (Not all otherkin are fortunate in that way to enjoy their human aspects, though, and that is valid. That does not necessarily mean misanthropic, it is often more like, ‘This human body is an issue, and this human culture is an issue, for me. I do not hate humans, but I do not belong, and am at conflict with humanity’.)
I’m not trying to deny my humanity. Humanity and everything around that concept is not at war with me most of the time, even though there are days I am very depressed or destructive because I feel trapped or ashamed.
There is one thing I am at war with. It is not humanity. I am not misanthropic.
What I seek to fight back against is only people who try to silence me and tell me my experience as a bat person is not meaningful or significant. Who try to tell me the ways in which I express myself are problematic and inappropriate, when they are not. And that is what a lot of otherkin are at war with.
Humanity isn’t necessarily the issue by way of being humanity. But this idea that we are somehow pretending because we need to feel special or feel we’re otherwise inadequate is a problem, because it is always coming from a place of ignorance, and fostering further feeling that we as other-than-human people are not worth being listening to.
That was damaging as a child, and it is damaging now, and it is a horrible thing to watch other non-human identified people who have less of an ability to deal with that kind of thinking, and watch them become depressed or be hurt by people always telling them they aren’t serious.
We are serious.
Being other-than-human is not a game.
And if you really had done your research you would understand more where we are coming from. There’s a list of links here at the bottom that is a good start, if you are really interested in understanding why we call ourselves what we do.
All of what chasingcaribou said.
