If there is one essay I wish I could read again from high school, it would be the open-ended essay question from my AP Language Arts exam. The prompt was to write about something we thought was overrated. I wrote about the concept of normality.
Now, I don’t remember what I argued back then with roughly an hour to write, and I’m not going to try and guess, but I do remember being on to something.
I have always been a person that people find easy to talk to. I don’t know if I simply have a comforting presence, or if my inability to be anyone but myself forces others to reflect their own selves back to me. People often act in a more open, loose, even weird manner when alone with me than they would when with a group of people. It would frustrate me beyond belief when people acted differently in different scenarios, especially when they denied events that happened between us that I brought up in group conversation, leaving me to look like the odd individual out.
No person is normal, and the inability to achieve normality is what makes the entire concept overrated. Normal is something you get across a group. An average, generalized description. But there are always abnormalities that make each and everyone of us different.
My life motto is “We Want Weird”. I use it as a reminder to be my authentic self. With no variance, there is no change, no growth, no movement forward as a whole unit. If we are all the same, we will stay the same.
Of course the fact that society does often drift in and out of trends, whether in music, clothing, or other areas, shows that there is no normal. If there was a normal, it would stay the same. It wouldn’t shift under the impression of one pop star or a handful of influencers on TikTok.
There is also far too much pretending involved. Humans interact daily in ways to maintain a certain appearance rather than out of genuine curiosity or care. People ask you how you are because it’s the polite thing to do, not because they expect you to actually give them the honest truth.
Normal is being indifferent, even to one another, but inside we’re not indifferent. Inside we have opinions and thoughts that we don’t share for one reason or another. It’s expected that we don’t. It’s also expected that we know we shouldn’t. We’re expected to know how to be normal.
But how can we be expected to know what’s normal when normal doesn’t stay, well, normal?
It’s utterly mystifying how more people don’t discuss this, but it is not normal to question the norm. I’ve decided I don’t really care. What are they going to do to me for questioning it, make me more of an outcast?
The interesting thing is most people who knew me, especially in high school, would be confused by the idea that I was an outcast. I was one of the brightest of my classmates, a star athlete on the soccer field and basketball court, and students and teachers both had nice things to say about me. It is an indisputable fact that I am loved by people where ever I go. (Trust me, my brain has spent a lot of time combating that statement, but I simply can’t deny the raw data of my lived experience.) I am an inherently good person, who was raised to tend to the needs of others. I pick up on the emotional states of the people surrounding me, and I try to consider a person’s situation when they’ve wronged me in order to move on.
All of this to say, of course I was loved. I had worked out the road map to likability.
That didn’t mean I fit in with the norm.
I have never truly belonged. But then again, if there is no normal, maybe there was no “normal” to belong to.