Tired of Being Human

I believe that identity is a sort of malleable gel of thoughts, something bound and influenced by the world around you. Everything about your identity is tied to the way you exist within the world around you, as a person, as a human. What makes you "you" is what separates you from an "other" you just often do not think about (if you are lucky enough). Identity informs the way you interact with the rest of the world, but also how the rest of the world around you. And we, as people, as humans, have built a ton of small interactions and parades around signaling who we are, what role we are playing.

This is not a coming out. It's mostly not about me. While this is my own corner of the internet, i find it egocentric to write about me (ironic, i know). This is about what i learned, and what you may be able to take from it. That being said…

Let's Talk about Lux

My identity shifted a lot as i aged. Moving away from the cookie cutter cis-het-allo-white-everything template of my environment growing up required a lot of undoing things i was thought, a process that is imperfect, ongoing, and will have to remain that for the rest of my life.

Tangentially to that, one part of my identity has been, for an amount of years worryingly close to 10, being a furry.

Lux [they/them] is three things:

• One of the many names i go online and IRL by
• My fursona (i assume if you're here that is probably a word you know about)
• Unknowingly at the time, an expression of a profound desire to change as a physical and social person, to build my own identity and express it honestly

For the longest of time the exact relationship between Lux and i had been weird. They were at the same time a character, but also a goal to aspire to, but also me. As i moved along through my transition however, and changed them as a result, they became definitely separate from me. Yet, there remained something about them i wanted desperately.

Lux transitioned alongside me. They were, and remain to this day, a tool of creative expression. A part of me, but also not a part of me, and perhaps a future part of me.

Being in this position of constant evolution for the past decade or so, i learned that a lot of things are really just made up. Gender, sexuality, social norms of politeness, money status, etc. They are real things that have had and still have real, deadly consequences, but they're made up. It clicked in my mind that the terms we use to described what people, what humans we prefer to bonk are made up the day i tried to reason around what being gay while non-binary would mean.

It's all made up.

All of you. Maybe you did not even decide to make it up yourself.

Undoing Humanity

Being queer, autistic, disabled, marginalized for an identity we didn't choose, treated like an other by people, humans, takes a toll on you. Admittedly, mine is less than others, or than what it could have been. Some of my friends have it orders of magnitude worse. To an extent, the trauma is, however, collective. An attack on one of us is an attack on us all.

When the world around you constantly signals that a minimum level of acceptance and respect is derived from being human while constantly denying it to you and those like you and around you, you start thinking about what it means to be human. On a biological level, we sort of understand it (even though taxonomy is also made up). Have you ever thought about what it means, socially, to be human? It feels like asking what it feels like, physiologically, to breathe air.

i recall seeing seeing artwork from @TheHearthFox [E/Em/Eir] years and years ago which described how e felt coming into eir psychologist's office, shown visually in the comic by a stark change of the character who transformed from an otherwise rather non-distinct androgynous human to Hearth, the fox. Another piece of eirs caught my attention a little bit afterwards showing how e felt an invisible presence at times, fox ears on top of eir head which followed alongside eir environment and emotions. At the time, i remember being fascinated by the idea of feeling these things, almost jealous. Finally seeing someone who you can show your real, raw self, without shame or the need to hide.

i sat on the thoughts for years, watched as me and my friends and i increasingly fucked around with our own identities, transed our genders in new and creative ways that had no other drive but to feel good and give a fat middle finger to the system that had attempted to shape us into things we were not.

i kept going at it, i keep fucking up my gender again and again, blurring my presentation, i keep identifying with my embracing of weirdness and my rejection of what i feel society expects of me.

In the end, what remains? The choice of being human, or not, and the potential to reject humanity and its social implications.

Theriantropy

Theriantropy is the identification, in part or whole, with an animal as a part of yourself. It is one of several non-human identity labels in common use today. It is often symbolized with the two greek letters ΔΘ , denoting difference/change (Δ or δ in physics) and a bestial nature (Θ being the first letter of θηρίον, meaning "beast"). θ also symbolize the term we use to describe ourselves: therians.

Like many things, what we believe to be human is honestly more malleable than people are willing to think about.

There is this joke among us who use it/its as pronouns:

"it/its pronouns is dehumanizing" it is, i am <insert species/kin>

At this point in my life, i feel like it resonates with me as well. i am unsure to which extent i provoked it or found it happening to me. Not too long ago, while being overstimulated in an otherwise neurotypical-friendly environment, i thought to myself:

« Hey, relax. The sounds around you are confusing. Here, you have ears there now. Think about where your focus is, and they will go.

In the big confusing world of people, you feel lost. If you can choose, be a fox. »

It started as intrusive thoughts visualizing and feeling ears atop my head, then a tail in my back. Spacial grounding has always been the best for me it seems.

It then started happening intermittently, at random times. Then the ghost feelings started. One day, i recoiled from the feeling of a hand sliding down my back. It'd had felt as though it had slid right through a tail that was not there. i never fought against it, it just felt natural, like something i had wanted to do for so long but felt forced to repress.

i had been aware of the concept of theriantropy for a while now. i had first heard of it as a teenager while getting to know the furry community. For a long time, therians have sort of always been like that weird sibling who lives in the attic who you don't really talk about to strangers because you're kind of ashamed of them.

Yet i am weird. The core concept of my identity seems to be the rejection of norms. i make squeaking noises as a form of affection, i jump around randomly to express happiness, i whimper to show sadness. i sit in weird positions, i refuse to conform to the social norms imposed upon humans, people, because they irk me, they go against my very nature. i ate pasta out of a dog bowl with my name on it for lunch today, for crying out loud! Why? Because it feels good and fun.

In the flesh i am a person, however, my close friends have increasingly began calling me a fox.

While i inhabit the body of a human, my mind is the entity i consider to be the true me, regardless of the vessel that carries it. i have gotten used to, and even learned to appreciate, show off, and enjoy my own flesh. i find it limited, however. There is something it doesn't quite capture or express. There are limbs that i find missing at times, emotions that do not transcribe well. There is something that could be hacked, like i thoroughly hacked my own sex hormones. Knowing something is made up is halfway to the forbidden knowledge that it can be dismantled and perhaps rebuilt the way you want.

If you do not think this is real, fine. You probably do not get it. The spectrum of human expression is unfathomably wide. i had to learn that myself.

If you think i am a delusional and just trans and weird, and i should stick to these identities or i will make the *phobes think we're all degenerates who think they're animals or whatever: cool. Sit over there with the other pick-mes and don't bother me further or talk to me.

There is a reason this is not talked about. Same reason this article has been a draft for five months now. There is a similar reason for which my pronouns are currently "she/her" in professional settings, and not "they/them". Same reason i have a capitalized name on my ID that i rarely get called by outside of a professional setting these days. This isn't the kind of thing you casually share with your coworkers at work around coffee. Yet, at the same time, this is part of me in a way. It is a part of the shattered fractal that forms my identity as a whole, one that you can never look at entirely at once, but where each and every part influences the next.

So, what's the point?

Be weird. Bathe in the glory of rejecting what feels normal. Think about what normal means. Be kind upon others and lift each other up.

i am lux. i use they/them, it/its and she/her pronouns. Out of professional contexts, i will uncapitalize the first person pronoun to refer to myself. In the right headspace, this fox may even start referring to itself in the third person, as further detachment from humanity and personhood.

This is an identity i find comforting, and, in spite of all of what i have said until now, i am not particularly interesting, nor is my weirdness very different. i pulled on a thread while trying to unravel the mystery of my constantly shifting identity, and here we are.

Hopefully, you, reader, have thought a little bit about what normal is. In closing, let me ask you something.

Aren't you tired of being human? Don't you want to be weird?