i hate being an animal
I am a creature, and this brings me deep shame.
Part of me has to will myself into writing this — I find it difficult to confront myself as an animal, and I wish I wasn’t. It feels really idiotic to say or explain. I am sure on some level this is something most people find some relative difficulty in: both understanding themselves as an animal and understanding the implications thereof. As the only known thing capable of self aware thought we have afforded ourselves a brilliant space to breathe in the both conscious and unconscious embracing of our intellectual capabilities. Man is a thinking animal even in the most thoughtless man.
The cruel irony of said thought is it being shackled — locked in a cage of flesh and unable to extend itself beyond the capabilities of said flesh. Imagination is limitless just as thought is, but both can only manifest in reality at present by the use of the human body. It is an injustice that consumes me every day, inwardly targeted, destructive in nature. That man has nature feels like a crime.
I find myself a profoundly ugly thing. Or perhaps I am inside a profoundly ugly thing, but I find that in the physical sense what I am — the brain or the mind, if they can be separated at all — is an ugly thing. I am an animal, and I am an ape, and I want to stop. I cannot stop. There is no way of changing what I am, and the ways I could are limited to the speculative. Materially and presently, there is no way for man to escape the designs of an amoral evolution, not subject to morality or judgement.
Why am I ashamed of myself? It is a shame that I am no better than an animal, that I do animal things and think animal thoughts. It is irrelevant that nobody has ever not been an animal, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being an animal. I am filled with an intense shame and self hatred that this animal is something inherent to myself, that I may be unable to ever cease being an animal. That everyone does these things on a regular basis is a larger injustice that deeply upsets me, but more often than not I find myself stuck in my own personal understanding of myself — I blame nobody for not feeling the way I do. It is not the prerogative of many other people to cease being an animal, and most people do not mind it. I would not force shame like this on anyone else. But in my own respect, I am ashamed that I am one.
Our nature is unknown to us in most real ways — the specter of evolutionary psychology being a flawed and often incorrect one — aside from manifest ways we react in line with all other existing animals. Despite ourselves and our abilities to rationalize, we are still subject to the irrational stressors of the lizard brain. We still hunger, we still thirst. We are still subject to the ugliness of the animal form: of pulsating meat and churning insides. We still defecate, we still salivate. We are ascended animals, ones capable of introspection. But all the same, that is what we are.
I feel there’s something identified there, something understood to most in an unconscious way, that there is something wrong there. That there is a grave injustice that we are emergent from nature and completely unalike it. It is a wordless understanding often found in a variety of different ways — a million conclusions. A grasping at an explanation for why, an ingenuity resultant from the boundless human imagination. What we know is what we can observe, and what we can observe is vicious in spite of ourselves. To be human is to not be vicious in a vicious world. To find yourself enslaved to the animal part of yourself when that viciousness reappears.
How do you justify it? We live in a universe without justification: things happen for a reason, but reason is a human conception. We can intellectually justify things and understand cause and effect, but the universe and nature is not conscious of what it does and does not intellectually justify things to itself. We justify with spirits, with gods, with souls. We justify the unobservable and inconceivable in observable and conceivable ways, until those things in turn become observable and conceivable.
I deeply admire the human mind, and the way it uses human hands. I deeply admire what we do.
But I feel it is a grave injustice that we are not more than we are. I hate that I have to eat. I hate eating. I hate the animal things we have to do, or are forced to do.
Many try to make broad statements on what human nature implies and how it affects our own behaviors. Most, the way I see it, are pessimistic and misanthropic. Largely simplified and largely wrong. Cruelty is subject in every animal, including ourselves — but we are the only species that can intellectually understand cruelty, can deem it immoral, can understand morality. I cannot in good conscience see something with that capability as inherently parasitic or prejudiced and selfish. Selfish insofar as any animal, but capable of understanding selfishness is wrong.
I cannot trust myself, knowing that I am an animal. I trust others, but cannot trust myself. I am unsure where I start and end, or if it even matters. I do not want to be made of meat, I do not want to be meat, I do not want to be an animal, and I do not want to be inseparable from animalia and flesh. I cannot trust which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are influenced by the body, and I do not want to be my body. I do not want to be the bacteria, the acid, the stomach lining and hair. I do not want to use them. I do not want to be hormones, to be chemicals, to be awash and afraid like an animal is.
What do I want to be? What do I aspire to be? Put me in a fucking computer, who cares. There’s no answer and no material solution, no point in wasting that time dreaming of a future I’ll never see. For now I am lost in myself, a ghost in the machine, wishing I did have a spirit or a soul. Something I could connect to and transcend my own flesh with: a hope for every person that the flesh would not be all they are imprisoned to. That there’s something more, something beautiful. Maybe that is religion without religion — hope without hope, a wish I put my life into despite the sheer impossibility of it coming true.
Why am I ashamed of something nobody has an alternative to?
I’m disgusted with myself. I’m disgusted I’m enslaved to my own body, and my own body is as hideous as it is, and that every person that lives and has ever lived suffers that same fate. I hate that we are something so beautiful trapped in something shaped without our consent, without our hand. If I were inseparable, I could not live. I’ve cried over this. That I can’t change it, that it’s all I might ever be.
I breathe. We shouldn’t have to.
We use these things for good. We have hijacked the amorality of nature to create a beautiful human nature — though we are constrained by our own systems as much as nature’s. But they are tools. I wish for new tools, new hands — not these filthy claws, not these soft things. Nobody has a choice in the matter, but we should. Humanity is choice. There is an animal inside us, not apart of us but alongside us, no matter how intertwined it may be. If only it could be ripped away, like a tick from flesh by the sake of a blade. We breathe, but we shouldn’t have to. I pray one day we can stop. That we no longer live, yet we continue to be.
