On alienness

[sya]

In my everyday life, I view the term alien as more of a quality that someone or something has, even though I would normally define it to other people as any organism that exists outside of earth.

But being as inhuman as I am, I understand how earth centric such a definition is. On another world, sapient life would call earthlings alien because they exist off world and have a different evolutionary history.

Over time, I'm realizing that it's becoming less that I feel alien and more that the life on earth itself is alien. Life here has been normalized to be a certain way from an early age to me. It's because of this that it's taken so long for me to understand this. The way I interpret my experiences is that I was born here, forgot nearly everything, and am trying to relearn old knowledge and old ways of thinking or doing things. I want to know things, and I find it important that I do so. I strongly feel that I lived before and that I'm not new at living. I'm new at living in a human society however, and I can't fully adjust.

My phantom limbs, my sensory synthaesia, and the way my thoughts form are only alien and strange to a human. If I was back with my kind right now, all of this would be the norm. It would be the human experience that would be strange and alien. To me, it feels that way.

The way humans feel romantic and sexual attraction feels as foreign to me as it must be for them to experience what I experience. I feel less strange if I'm myself in a vacuum. It's when I'm with others that I feel strange, for whatever reason that may be. So I am alien in an earthling's definition of the word. I call myself alien as a frame of reference for others to quickly understand what I'm talking about. I don’t personally see it that way all the time. I know my habits and my brain. It's normal. It would be weird for me to be more human. In that case, I would be becoming more alien.

I know that if I tell most orthohumans all of this, they'd think I'm strange and eccentric, and yes-alien. So I don't say anything to them unless they are very close friends and can fully trust them. And reaching that point is rare. But I can only go so long with masking and pretending to be normal around others. You can never hide from yourself.