Alien grief

[sya]

(Reposted from tumblr)

I have the sense that when I do feel grief or sadness, it's inherently in a nonhuman way. I don't know how to explain this exactly. It's this feeling that although humans and my species grieve in a similar way, it has a different subjective feeling to it. Both grieve over death and loss, but the inherent feelings tied to those things contain a different context. The grief I experience is informed and influenced through this alterhuman context.

A sort of a negative post:

I find myself behaving to certain events and situations in the same way my species would. I don't feel that I react to things in a "human" way. My emotions are powerful, but I don't really express them. My history and the racial wounds of my species are felt strongly right now. How this is even possible despite being born to human parents, I don't know, (it might be physical nonhumanity related, maybe???) But I still feel incredibly loyal and honor bound to my species and want to uphold life as we were taught that our progenitors also had originally done. This sort of honorbound oath is a deeply held instinct. But instincts in a sapient manner are not often spoken about in alterhuman communities. And I feel this strongly despite being as distanced as I am from my species here. I'm stubborn and willful when it comes to asking for help or showing vulnerability. 

The longer you survive, the more traumas you get. And since I was in my early teens, I had the sense that I was some sort of old, grizzled war veteran. Not by choice, but because of the shit life threw at me. I did what I had to do to survive and to help others. And experiences from both lives still play a role in this survivor's guilt. I don't know why I survived for so long when others haven't, but I did, and it's a lingering feeling that remained. Surviving for as long as I did surprises me still. I'm overburdened, I always feel like I should be able to do more, even if that is an incredibly unrealistic standard to hold myself up to, because I have limits.

 I thought I'd become desensitized as more bad things happen, but it just ends up stacking over time. I'm constantly behaving as if the world is about to end and that tragedies will happen in some length of unexpected time. Yes, I understand that my anxiety exaggerates these feelings, but it doesn't explain it all away .