Being Normal: The Phenomenon

"Why can't I be a normal human being for once?" She asks me, and secretly I pray this question is rhetorical.

"Why try to be normal when you're so unique?" I try to convince her of the reality of the situation at hand.

"Unique is so over-rated," she replies.

I might not be old and wise, but I've had my fair share of this conversation with people. More often than less, it’s the people that stand out the most that have this feeling. People who feel like they don’t really fit in with the rest of society but want to. Their fear is that if they're caught being who they really are, they will be disbanded from society and frowned upon.

The reality of the matter is, I'm not normal, hell, I'm a lunatic 90 ways to hell. I have phases where I run around making stupid noises, I make the world's lamest and stupidest jokes, I'm weird and freakishly emotional, and I express myself by who I am and I get by just fine.

The question that comes up here is what is normal really? What exactly are the parameters for being this so called 'normal'? If I were to barbeque a cockroach (whose name is Bob by the way) and eat him, I'd be classed as a nut job on this side of the world. Now let's move to Asia where people have this on the street as if it was a snack or a delight. There I'm normal. There I'm just like one of them.

Not satisfied with that example? Alright, take my mentally ill brother. He has a condition that his brain is that of a 3 year old, and no matter WHAT street he walks on, he's always viewed as being special. He might not talk like me or you, he might throw tantrums like a 3 year old, but he's way more than the cover shows. Last week, I finished 15 years of education at school, yet with his un-educated mind, he still finds ways to fool me, and as if that’s not enough, there is a reservoir of fully qualified MDs and PhDs in my house that are just as easily fooled by him.

Truth be told, this whole 'normal' thing is something set by society of a model person who they would like to be. This 'normal' doesn’t really exist. It’s a combination of the majority of people and their own standards pooled together to form this phenomenon, and whoever doesn’t follow this 'normal' standard isn’t part of society. But we're not machinery that you throw the defective piece away because it didn’t meet the quality checklist and let it rot in the junkyard. We weren’t born in a standard setting. We're all different.

Since we were born, we had the 'societal handbook of normal living' drilled into our brains. How to act and react, how to respond, how be this and how to be that, and some people who were an inch out have hammered themselves to fit in and succeeded in doing so. Others on the other hand, wake up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror, and pick up the pieces off the floor and shape themselves the way society wants it, pulling it together to fit into normal, all the while breaking down inside.

What isn’t normal is forcing people to get into skins they don’t fit into. Let's take Albert Einstein, one of the greatest minds of physics. He wasn’t normal. If normal was a circle, he was a 50 edged shape. His teacher abandoned him and let him go because he was different. Had his mother thought the same way, some of the great revolutions of the world wouldn’t have been possible. There are millions of things out there that depend on E=MC2, things we use in daily life. As insignificant as it seems, that single equation is what a lot of modern technology is based on.

I'm not standing here saying lets diminish all societal rules and live like animals. Even animals have ways of life, but what I'm saying is, being different is fine, being different is the real normal. What I'm saying is that society should give people a chance before they judge a book by the cover. Maybe get into their boots and understand them before they start putting every different person on trial just because they don’t suit and/or match their standards. And let me end with this, we're ALL different. You, me, my brother everyone, it's just that some people are more closely related than others, and those who are not normal are usually the most amazing people to get to know, and my fellow writer to whom I tribute this piece to, normal is a cliché, and guess what? You're awesome.