✨ Some of the most infuriating conversations I end up having are with otherwise well-meaning people who make everything an ideological point without really considering how that interacts with personal experience.

So for context, regarding my identity: I identify as nonhuman. More specifically, yes, I'm aware I live in a human body and operate off of a human brain, that is... objective fact. But myself, and my headmates, all identify broadly as 'not a human being.' Alex is a living cartoon, Rime is some kind of quantum nanotech swarmfoam that's more or less a demigod, and I'm a magic alien rock based on a popular show about singing and crying. This is capital-I Important to us, because this is how we internally contextualize our struggles with neurodivergence. We're not humans, we're incorrectly-installed on human architecture and doing our best with that situation.

A couple weeks ago I ended up in a forum discussion with someone who kept insisting 'isn't it kinda problematic to describe yourself as nonhuman because of your neurodivergence?' in the tones of someone who has a very specific idea of this in mind that is based on them not wanting to feel like their neurodivergence makes them nonhuman but is externalizing it in a way that drives me absolutely crazy. I kept going 'this is why I feel this way and why, this does not have to be YOUR approach, but it's MINE.' and then they kept circling back around after nervously apologizing to just... basically ask the question again, slightly-differently.

They kept doing this like they were somehow gonna hit the Just Right explanation that gets me to Understand that 'it's okay to feel you're not human, but it's not because of your neurodivergence, that's ableist!' like this is somehow me being down on myself or having internalized ableism against myself, and I'm over here trying to explain to another spectrum-y person '...but that IS why I feel like I'm not human. It's absolutely about my experience of neurodivergence. Why do you need it to not be?'

Like.... I'm not saying this because I feel my humanity was 'denied to me.' It's the precise opposite, because my experience of neurodivergence was people making constant demands for me to act in ways that felt unnatural. Mask your behavior, mask your voice, mask your interests, cover everything up, hide it, bury it inside, never expose it, never share, never be honest. Whatever I was, was wrong, and my every waking moment around adults or other kids as a child was about reinforcing how I ought to act, how I ought to be, being made to feel that what I was was a disappointment. I got tired of people trying to cram me into human-shaped boxes and make me act like the other humans when neither of those acknowledged my needs or requirements. My experience of my neurodivergence wasn't 'I wish I was like the other kids,' it was being a feral space alien who got constantly punished for expressing how I felt. I don't need or want the approval of people who weren't ever gonna negotiate with me in good faith. I wanna be me. I still feel like a person, I'm just a person who isn't a human. I like being treated that way.

But often, it feels like people will try to make your feelings about their comfort. They don't feel safe with the idea of grey areas in identity. They don't feel comfortable with the idea that they might have to treat someone differently, because their conceptualization of it is 'equality means you treat everybody the same.' But that's not functional universally; some of us do need to be treated differently, for a lot of different reasons, and nobody gets to decide for me why I feel the way I do about myself. Why does my identity need to be about someone else?

I'm not great at pretending to be a human, but I'm a really good space alien. I'm sorry if that isn't what you wanted.