"To dehumanize" usually bears negative connotations. I don't know if that's the way I use the word. Life has been a confusing thing so far. But as it progresses, there is more and more of a falling out with my sense of humanity. I don't necessarily think of myself as something better than a human either. But I feel that it's impossible to ignore several things that seem so uncommon in other people that they are not entirely human things to begin with.

This all has its basis, of course, in some level of alienation that was felt from an early age. The problem is chiefly the compounding of that alienation. In childhood I did not desire the approbation of others, nor did I seek it, but because of the way in which adults treat all children, I still would have it for various reasons. Not from those close to me, but at least from somebody, and my sense of otherness was only mild; I felt gifted, not necessarily fundamentally different.

Adolescence was a different beast. The lenience that is shown to a child was waning and the various pressures to adopt social customs and habits, and above all a social identity, was great. However, while identity had an inateness in the people around me, I did not feel an identity, insomuch as an identity is not readily built around negatives of preference or desire. Belonging was uninteresting. Status was uninteresting. Communal duty and communal glory lacked appeal and togetherness was almost, in a way, discomforting. Desires came mostly as fleeting scenes of an ideal aesthetic. For a while, those were what I strived for, but still, these were too perfect, and either out of reach, or not satisfiable in a reasonable frame of time.

Mostly I longed for absoluteness and an established self, which could replace the desire for meaning or purpose in life: it would be good enough a reason on its own to not feel defective, and in that sense, even if I belonged nowhere else, I could belong within myself.

But the inwardness that resulted was perhaps defective in its own right, and I became less functional in the communal, human world--not necessarily out of inability or uncertainty regarding what behaviors were appropriate, but because of a poverty of interest, a complete failing of genuine and honest expression, and the resulting impossibility to connect meaningfully with my human environment.

I don't regard humanity as the paragon of potential life, but at least presently, it's true that there is no satisfying alternative. Maybe in the future.