I don’t think anyone talks about how incredibly lonely it can be sometimes to be alterhuman. Sure, there’s online spaces, meet-ups, forums and groups, but outside of that? You’re inevitably going to have at least one small period of your life where no-one around you feels the way you do and you have no idea why. Maybe you’re a child who’s never heard the words ‘therian’ or ‘otherkin’. Maybe you’re deep in the antikin community, lashing out at joy with hate and fear. Maybe there’s something else keeping you seperate.
Whatever the reason, that part of life is… almost unbearably isolated. You feel different, different in a way you can barely put words to. Different in a way you often see others institutionalised for in books and movies. Different in the way you hear your thoughts, speak your words and experience your feelings. And more often than not, you don’t know why.
Why you? Why were you chosen to shoulder the burden of being so different? What made any benevolent creator (or lack thereof) reach down and plant such joy in your heart, and such pain also?
Your hands are not your own as they grip foreign objects of an alien world; cutlery, pencils, jewellery. Are you even meant to have hands? Sometimes your fingers ache with the knowledge they were never meant to exist in any meaningful capacity. Your heart beats too fast, too slow, too… human.
Your friends and family don’t understand. They can’t. They’ve never felt the call of the camphor-laden breeze, never lost themselves to the wild, frenetic energy of the night. They’re human. Your spirit extends beyond yourself, in impossible limbs that they will never yearn for. Your soul will not be contained within this flesh prison, it never could be, all whilst theirs rests comfortably at home.
There’s no words for this feeling, not in any book, nor television show. There’s no representation except for in the monstrous. There’s no celebrity that openly talks about it. There’s no dictionary that explains it. You’re different, alone, and entirely certain that you are the only person on earth to be a facsimile of a person; not a person at all.
And then you find the therian community. And you realise they’d been there all along, hidden from the mainstream conversation, away from the late-night talk shows and trivia competition questions.
And you wonder, in what cruel world could such unbearable loneliness continue to be allowed to persist when the answer existed in the background all along? Who let your heart break over and over, just to reveal it broke for nothing so painful at all? Who let you scream hoarsely into the void, begging for answers, all while the answers sat so close by?
How could any of this be fair?