Owning My Humanity -- Commitment

"Eventually we all have to make commitments to the things we hold dear, or risk losing them entirely."

I had thought about this, and questioned--'do I value being a person'?

On the one hand, you have expression, art, communion with friends and family... and on the other is the side of being a person that weighs you down--makes you dread each passing moment, wondering what the answer will be--expecting the 'no's', feeling the disappointment of being limited, by who you are, and who you know.

I was never one to settle for this, but there was no magic pill for success. I dreamed every passing day it could be so, and grew fat and tired doing so. I wanted to begin at the end, and reap the rewards... or was it simply that I wasn't happy with the rules? It became confusing, and distracting, thinking about the logistics of my failures, and depression was a weight on my soul.

Eventually, it occured to me that I had just been born wrong--a natural fluke that made me inadequate to be a person. I craved release from being a person--instead, I wanted to hide in the body of another creature, and take shelter in the rules of its lifestyle. No one cares about animals, whether they live or die, as long as they are not interfering in the affairs of people.

So my plan was to hide in the body of a vixen, and grow pregnant, and bear offspring. In spite of this, I was a twenty-something wash-up male, fast dreading middle age. My face sung of wasted attractiveness, sand leaking from the hourglass, and I was thirsty for rebirth.

Along the way stood a lot of people, and it seemed like many would be in my path; obstacles. I lived in a society full of placaters-- smiling empty heads affirming positive futures, without the means to provide. I myself was more feeble than they--at least they'd learned to squeeze a living offering out their empty promises of 'empowerment'.

What was my next move in life? Truthfully, I did not know. Shoot someone? Well, that would make for a messy downward spiral--hurting another person in frustration would just entangle me further in bureaucratic spiderweb. Suicide? I was never tolerant of pain, and the implications of destroying myself tormented me more (perhaps thankfully) than the initial source of my depression. As for pragmatic solutions like employment or education seeking, it was a paperwork maze. I almost wanted to just run off into the wild, ticks and mosquitos and rabid wildlife, exposure and starvation and thirst, bear traps and barbed wire and shoot-on-sight private property warnings be damned, I just wanted to turn into a savage.

There was an impotent fury, burning in me. A desire to be better than my fellow man--to EAT my so-called fellow man, these passively smiling faces that were hostile just beneath the surface--these beings that promised freedom, but were ready to stop me from taking a step toward it if I made the attempt. I wanted to become... alien to them. To be another species, wholly separate in appearance and behavior--to complete a transformation instilled in me at birth, and perpetuated by others reactions to my strangeness.

It's true, I felt little kinship with my fellow man... and it was something sorely missing; constantly betrayed. What trust did I have to work for? It seemed like my suspicion of others would devour me, constantly seeing their taunting, judging side just beneath their smile--knowing I was inadequate, unprepared, perhaps too slow, too tired, or too stubborn.

Resignation heralds demise, I think, so I should not continue to look at these things as irrefutable truths.

It's an incredible craving, to long to be another species. You see the physical attributes of a creature--you want to feel them supersede your own, by all manner of methods--the shedding of the exterior, or intense pressure sculpting your form through your clothes, tearing them away to reveal the muscles of a tail, or the head of another animal on a still-human frame. Perhaps you breathe the change, or it is layered on you like batter, or coaxed out by a subhuman mate, of similar species. You take your own real, physical experiences of arousal, of warmth and softness of blankets touching your skin, of respiration, exertion, and erection, and you become Pavlov to yourself, teaching the dog to drool at the sound of a bell, instead of at food. Only this is no simple conditioning--you become enamored with claws and fangs, with descent into bestial rut, and simple thought, and the entire human form rebelling--you think of these things in place of, in spite of, sometimes in addition to, the natural human triggers of arousal. You place yourself or another in your mind as a victim to this turning, and you imagine their devolution into something pleasurable--all of the faculties of a human, but none of the responsibilities or value systems--instead, the deliberate functions of an animal to hunt and reproduce, running with your mate by your side.

Waking from the lust long enough to drift into sleep, you bask in the want for change. That is how you waste a day like me--a trans-humanist furry, with little understanding of how the outside world works--having tasted the most bitter aspects of people young, and losing myself.

I chide myself for the dream, though it is beautiful to me. I am no defector to my kind, for I would not side with them to begin with. What irony then, if I starve as a fox, or go rabid. Perhaps I deserve the nine hundred ninety nine lifetimes as a fox, to contemplate my defect--live countless short failed lives at a time, obliviously caught in the cycle of samsara, equalizing my karma. Maybe this is Hell or Purgatory, and I've not grasped the fact. Perhaps I'm a defiler or infidel and will simply be destroyed altogether for my hubris as a nonbeliever. Maybe it's written and there's not a thing I can do. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps I can change. Fantasy and fear are both curiously paralyzing.

If it goes my way, every human gets preyed upon by my new perfect race--a foil to humans that exists to break down human societies to manageable levels. Some miracle species that eats some humans, and spares others to be turned, to be savage fox-kin. Dragons for a modern age, that can cope with human technology, but choose not to employ it--prefer savage, nigh-mystical implements--pathogens of conversion and pheromones of seduction, for making new tods. Perhaps they can even become a common enemy to humans, that allows us to unite and overcome our petty differences of ideology. I'd spearhead the attempt to destroy mankind, and be thwarted, and they'd be all the better for it. Or, I could win, and eat them, and have a good dump afterward.

I guess what I'm saying is, I 'enjoy' picking the villain role. I wish I could be the monster, even if it meant I had to be defeated. I'd give it my best go.

God I am hopelessly romantic. I'm glad I never enlisted, I'd probably get a lot of people killed.