Posts tagged normality

Time is running out, something I always feel acutely aware of.  Right now, I am in a comfortable place, relying on the support of my parents, but my parents will not always be there to provide me with that support.  One day I will be on my own.

Being on my own frightens me.  I’ve never had much faith in myself to get things on track and do what needs to be done to provide a life for myself.  For a very long time my plan was to slowly vanish from the lives of my friends, wait until my parents were no more, and then I would kill myself.  That is not something I say casually, or for dramatic effect, it just seemed to be the simplest, most logical solution to my problems.

Sometimes I still feel that way, but there are parts of me, maybe increasingly, that want to do the difficult thing - to get things sorted out and become independent.  

A couple of years ago my Mother had a (second) cancer scare.  We didn’t know if she would be OK (thankfully she is and only slightly worse for wear), and for a long time my thoughts revolved around how sad it would be for her to leave behind a daughter that was so broken.  Even looking back on that now makes me incredibly emotional.  Don’t I owe it to this woman to sort myself out and be happy?

I wish I was normal

People get mad when they hear someone say that.  ”Don’t be normal! It’s so boring!”.  Normal is now a terrible word - it implies blandness, boredom, a lack of identity, tedium and ennui.  Normal does not mean any of those things.  

Apparently I am all kinds of things - kooky, crazy, artsy, creative, geeky, mental, just plain weird.  They all feel like polite terms for what I actually am - mentally ill.  Maybe some of you don’t know that about me, maybe you think it’s far too strong a term.  It’s a charged term - it implies I’m a danger to myself or to others, that I hear voices or see things, believe weird stuff or have some bizarre compulsion or obsession.  I don’t have any of that, but I am mentally ill.  I’ve seen psychiatrists and psychologists, counsellors and therapists.  I’ve self-medicated and been medicated and sometimes both, which leads to spectacular vomiting.  

Normal can be a mathematical term, it describes data that is distributed in a bell curve - that is a few points at the extreme ends of the line with most points lying around the middle, roughly speaking.  Normal can be a psychological term too.

I told my counsellor (my current one), that I wished I could be normal, then quickly recanted.  I bought into the idea that it was a bad thing, that it meant I wished to be homogenous, that “normal” couldn’t truly exist because of the uniqueness of each person.  She told me it was good to want to be normal, and perfectly understandable.  

Let me explain what “Normal” means to someone like me, to a fully qualified crazy person, and I hope that it is somewhat representative of what other people in my position feel - it means being able to function in society, to lead the life that I wish to lead and to not be hemmed in or restricted by my own fears and anxieties, to not have my choices and freedoms limited by my utterly out of whack emotional states.  Normal does not mean I suddenly want to throw out all my paints and brushes, get a job in an office, dress entirely in grey and generally be the blandest average of every human being on the planet.  It just means I want to be myself.  But, you know, more normal.