I feel like I'm not really human. Most of the time I'm so busy doing that I don't think about it, but when I have time to just sit with myself, I have this overwhelming feeling like I'm a foreigner, an alien, in this sea of human beings, and the only person in the world from my planet or of my species on the Earth.
This morning was one of those times.
Over the years, I've learned to act more or less like the humans around me. It's like a fake personality, a ventriloquist's dummy, a mask that I wear almost all the time, to the point that I almost think that it is me. But it's always a strain, and I need a lot of alone time to recover. I'm constantly having to figure out what a human would do in the situation I am in, and then faking that response. I can act the part of a human being, but I can't ever feel whatever it is that makes them do what they do. At some level, human beings don't make sense to me. When I try to act human, it's as an outsider, someone who doesn't ever feel whatever it is that would make them naturally do what they do. It's like pretending to be a groundhog when you're not.
On the rare occasions when I think there might be some reason to try to communicate what I'm feeling underneath, it's a struggle to put it into language, because English doesn't seem to have words for it. Maybe that's why I like learning languages other than English: for me, every language is a foreign language, even the language I grew up with. Putting my thoughts and feelings and ideas into words is always a process of translation, of groping for words and phrases and allusions that sorta kinda maybe are a little like what I'm thinking and feeling. And when I finish, I realize it still isn't what is in my mind. It sounds like what a human might make of my non-human thought patterns, or like the way a human might describe how they think a horse thinks. It loses a lot in the translation.
And it's always a strain. I'm sort of like a refugee, a displaced person, except that refugees have a memory of a country where they once belonged, and I'm like a refugee without any memory of a nation of origin. Another way I describe it is like being the last passenger pigeon, a creature with nobody like them anywhere in the universe, simply waiting for the final extinction, occasionally wondering if it wouldn't be kinder to just get it over with.
It's always been this way for me. Even as a small child, if I tried to express how I felt or how I saw the world, or if I acted on my feelings, I would get rejected and punished. My family would mock me and punish me, my peers always rejected me for being "weird," and the adults who had power over me just kept scolding me and punishing me for not being like the rest of the kids. In order to develop, you have to be seen by other people and they have to show that they see you and accept (and value?) you for who you are, and nobody wanted to know the inner me. They just wanted it to go away. I not only had no need for a language to describe who I really was, I was better off for not having one, because that way it was less likely that I would inadvertently let more of my weirdness and unacceptableness show. And I've never found anyone who gives me the feeling that they also feel something like what I feel inside.
It's this way with my "trans-ness," too. On the one hand, I feel so much better now that the part I'm trying to act is a female part, but on the other hand, when other people talk about what being trans is like for them, it doesn't sound like what I feel inside. I don't get "identifying as ..." at all -- it just plain does not compute. I wouldn't say "I feel like a woman," because I have no idea what that would feel like; I don't even know what being human feels like, other than maybe the feeling that there are other people like you. I'm always on the outside looking in. Gender is just one of those funny things that those humans do, and though I can (with effort) act like it means something to me, it's all an act. Inside, I'm just me -- a little like E.T., but not as cute.
(I was wondering: what would the movie E.T. have looked like if Steven Spielberg had tried to make it from E.T.'s point of view? And would anybody have wanted to watch it?)