What a load of Bullshit.
What the Hell is Normal?
I was not a bad kid. I mean, I liked to do and play at the same stuff as other kids in my school, but for reasons I still struggle with, why was I the one always in trouble? For some reason I always took things a little farther, to far apparently. I was the one that got strapped in school every year, and even multiple times every year!! (yes, it was allowed, and yes it was practiced.) I was the one in detention. Strangely though I also got Straight A's when I wanted to and won speak-offs when I was so inclined and interested in doing it. In the same year I was on the school's champion "Reach for the Top" team, I took regular days off and spent too much time with the non-"Reach for the Top" kids learning how to shoplift. This was my normal?
My Mother had MS, my father suffered mental illness. Both hardworking and good people. Good people who worked hard and raised by most accounts good kids. Definitely not a normal household according to the world. (?) But when I looked at my friends around me I saw single parent families, alcoholism, spouse abuse, drug abuse. Where where the normal families????
Okay, must have been my neighborhood right? I mean, I have been told I grew up in the wrong part of town and was poor. No matter, I joined the cadet program where I rubbed shoulders with all the kids from the well to do, good parts of town, from wealthy families... Ummm nope. When I think back to their parents of those folks what did I see... Well ... again drunks, spouse-beaters, adulterers and just as much dysfunction. Now, don't get me wrong, there were some a happily married two-parent loving and caring families I knew in there a couple even in my own neighborhood... but they were the exceptions, they were NOT the norm. The thing that we believed to be normal was a rare , very rare thing. And THAT was/is the problem.
We (my generation) all went through life watching the TV shows and the movies and wishing and wanting to be the people and families on TV. We thought that this is the way life is supposed to be. But, writers you see do not just reflect life, sometimes they invent fiction for fun and profit. Sometimes they want to show us how it should or could be. They show us things that are not necessarily real but could be, or should be real.
Fabrications.
Made up.
Invented.
Those families didn't exist then, and they don't exist now. The teachers in our schools lied about what was, and wasn't normal. We hid anything that was not what we thought was normal. We didn't want to be found out, still don't. We hid things that made us different, we learned to act like the differences didn't exist. Being different was not accepted. Sometimes still isn't. There was no diversity in the world then and we suffer to this day because we didn't and don't really want to embrace it or now. How many posts do you still see on FB these days that saying thing like "CANADA: If you can't speak English/French leave!" Yeah real embracing of different huh?
I mean really, who wants to be abnormal? Who wants to admit that their life is less than it is supposed to be? Who wants to openly live, saying to the world, "I am unable to live that which you all say and think I should be living." ?
The reality, I believe, is that most of us spend out life wanting to be accepted as part of the crowd. We want to fit in. Given that society says, "this is normal." we assume it is what we are supposed to be doing, and that by doing it, we can be part of the faceless crowd. It's safe and comfortable. No undue attention comes our way. We blend into the fabric of everyday life. We become sheep. We give up the ability to think and decide for ourselves. We conform. WE become normal.
We all have our own bag of rocks to try and work our way through the world with. A friend suggested to me that the problem is we know what's in our bag, but we forget that others have their own full bag of rocks. We think their bag is better, smaller, and lighter. Of course we haven't carried their bag, so it's easy to think that... Growing up I had some successes and some failures. I built my own bag of rocks in addition to the ones I was given by the world. Others look at me and based on their own situations (read bag of rocks) see me as sucessful or as a failure. When I do things other view as successful I bet my bag of rocks must have seemed real small or non-existent to those watching me. When doing things I viewed as unsuccessful I felt as if I couldn't carry my bag another step. But hey that's normal.... right?
There is no normal, just people with bags of rocks, each bag as different and unique as the person struggling with it. Hmmmm maybe... maybe.....maybe if we spent less time trying to live as if we had someone else's bag, ...maybe... if we spent more time trying to look inward, and lighten our own bag by learning to drop rocks that can be dropped, we might be fundamentally happier people? Live for yourself I say, carry and deal with your own bag of rocks. Learn which ones you can drop. Fuck the others, fuck normal, who needs someone else's rocks anyway? Are you sure their bag is lighter? Are you sure their bag is smaller? Are you sure they have less rocks? Do you know all of their rocks? Do you know the weight? Can you even carry their rocks?
I have my own rocks. Normal doesn't exist. The solution to my life is not to have someone else's rocks. The solution to my life is to try and make the best I can of my life. Learn to manage my own rocks. "Look within not without."
Ban Normal. Life should not be lived trying to match or meet an invisible benchmark that is arbitrarily created by the imaginations of others. We all should rejoice in being unique and different. Once we can accept that...once we can learn to live with, and love one another despite and for our differences, .....
Then maybe we can even help each other with those rocks...
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