child of the wolf

Oftentimes while scrolling through nonhuman tumblr, especially therian/holothere tumblr, I see a lot of posts of people talking about their struggles to fit in with regular humans. How they feel isolated, othered, and struggle to function “normally” in society due to their identity. I don’t talk about it much, but I too struggle with feeling like this. I am outwardly different from others, I avoid expressing myself in pubic, and I struggle to understand some human customs and concepts that just don’t exist in the animal kingdom; but the difference is, I know why I feel this way, and it’s not just because of my identity.

I am neurodivergent, as are many if not most nonhumans. I’m autistic and I have ADHD, several anxiety disorders, a depressive disorder, and PTSD. I’ve known I was nonhuman my whole life, I consider myself to have been born nonhuman, and my neurodiversity is largely the reason why I feel this way. Autism is basically the poster child for “people who are different”— we communicate differently, struggle with social cues, have different sensory needs, and different ways of thinking, in other words, we’re weird. A lot of the nonhuman community is neurodivergent, many are autistic like me, so we fit in well amongst eachother, but that also comes with downsides. Common traits like social difficulty or different sensory needs are often attributed to being caused by one’s identity or “being weird” rather than the actual diagnostic cause, and I think that does a great disservice to the alterhuman community as a whole. Not just for autism, but every mental disorder.

When I see posts talking about how this person is having physical pain because of shifts, or this person is experiencing severe anxiety because of their species dysphoria, I get really worried. A persons identity, no matter what it is, should never cause them harm like that. The alterhuman community is usually very good at being open about neurodiversity, and tries it’s best to be a welcome and accepting space for all, but it often avoids actually talking about those conditions past a surface level. For example, you see in someone’s bio that they have autism, but almost every post is filled with confusion and questions. “Why do I feel so different from everyone else? Why can’t I socialize normally? Why do I act the way I do? Why do I think the way I do?” they are in a never ending search for the answer to their questions, but they’ve actually already found it.

This community has a bad habit of treating neurodiversity like it doesn’t actually affect a person on a deeper level and instead attributing all their symptoms to their identity, which only leads to more confusion. I feel that I was born nonhuman and will likely stay this way my whole life, but I know that the real reason why I struggle in social situations, why I don’t understand certain rules or language, why I communicate and act differently, and why I hear and smell and feel with such intensity is not because I am a wolf, it’s because I am autistic.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a “bad side of nonhumanity”, but simply symptoms that many people in the community experience due to having similar disorders or identities. Most of the community is autistic or has some sort of anxiety disorder, therefore social difficulties are common. Most of the community is transgender, therefore a lot of us experience dysphoria about our bodies, etc etc. The negative things we experience are not directly caused by being nonhuman, they just happen to line up. I’ve seen many nonhumans who experience no adverse side effects from their identity, I’ve seen people who experience everything we do and yet they identify as human.

This isn’t me saying “nonhumanity isn’t real, you’re just crazy and sick” but just an acknowledgement at the fact that this community has a fixation on the idea that every symptom or trait you experience must be because you’re nonhuman, and never ever because of your diagnosis. The thing that bothers me about posts like these, where a person is so obviously struggling with a real mental/medical condition but is refusing to acknowledge it, is the mindset that these negative symptoms are somehow just a part of alterhumanity and therefore theres nothing you can(or should) do about them, even if doing so would greatly improve your quality of life. Seeking help is seen as a negative thing, pointing out potentially dangerous and even deadly medical phenomenon is seen as a personal attack, and that’s absurd. You are not hallucinating because of your alterhumanity, you are hallucinating because you are experiencing psychosis. You are not having constant migraines because of phantom shifts, you might have a chronic migraine disorder. You are not struggling to speak or read because you have an animal brain, you might have a neurological disorder or learning disability. You are not feeling suicidal because you were born in the wrong species, you might have a depressive disorder.