Phosphor [&]

conversation with a friend got me thinking about internal nonhumanity again, and I've never really talked about my experience of it here so I might as well take the opportunity to ramble

the long story short is:

• there's just a Lot of Things About Me that could separately be explained very well by "normal" things like being trans, being neurospicy, growing up in a shitty family, and so on. and for the most part, when it comes to Things That Can Have Actions Taken About Them, I will go to those explanations first.
• but on the inside, my nonhumanity just... fits. it explains and encompasses all those disparate things in a way that just rhymes true to my brain. it is the story that is the me.
• (something something frameworks and explanations are not mutually exclusive; there are multiple levels on which we experience ourselves)

for example:

• if I am depressed, I am not going to assume that this is A Fundamental Aspect Of Being Nonhuman And Therefore I Cannot Do Anything About It. I am going to go look at whether I've been sleeping properly, whether I've been doomscrolling, etc, and maybe talk to our brain doctor about adjusting our brain meds.
• at the same time, I recognize that in my depressive periods, there is a constant thread of anguish and powerlessness that makes sense when I view it with a nonhumanity lens. doing so just makes it that much more coherent in my brain, catches it and contains it into a story that I can think about or make stuff about or whatever. versus actively trying not to, which feels like attempting to shove an octopus into a pringles can

I'm very agnostic on spiritual stuff (of the "maybe the metaphysical exists but I will turn to material/psychological explanations first until given solid reason otherwise") and on paper, I'm the same way about my nonhumanity. I find it hard to believe in past lives or other worlds or suchlike. at the same time, I fundamentally feel like I am "from elsewhere", "just passing through", and so on. it automatically colors my thoughts and my feelings and my perception. so it's something that I've decided to just kind of accept as something that is true within the story-of-the-self without worrying about how factual it is.

and of course, the million-dollar question: what species? to which I say that I don't really bother. like, from a psychological perspective it's silly to expect an intensely personal experience to map exactly onto something in the outside world and from a metaphysical perspective it's silly to expect something otherworldly to map exactly onto human categorizations and from a "who even cares" perspective it just isn't something I care about. (obviously this is just me, not something that's true for every nonhuman.) I've fiddled with various words in the vague direction of whatever-it-is but the closest I can arrive at is "some kind of extraplanar outsider with motivations and principles that would largely be considered benevolent by humans, taking a brief jaunt in this world in a human skin. for Reasons, I guess."