Everyone wants to be special, and some people are, but never in the way they think they are. 
—John Kells

Specialness is like a stubborn refusal to be anything other than what you are. An inability to conform. Such creatures stand for something, they have symbolic function—they have energy as my teacher would have put it. And creature is a good word for them since they live by continually creating themselves, like snakes ever emerging from the old skin.