If we are supposed to celebrate our differences…

How can anyone be “normal”?

If that title got you scratching your head, I’m sure you’re not the only one. The way I see it, society and the world today are making this into quite a conundrum. It’s cool to be different, but you must go along with the hive mind. Be normal.

Normal, like that wash machine cycle.

Is there really a “normal” type of human? What parameters describe this? What type of society is “normal”? If everyone were normal, in whatever capacity that is supposed to describe, this world would be incredibly boring. We surely would not have the level of technology that we do today; so many inventions were not only out of necessity, but were made by those well outside what one would describe as “normal”.

Einstein? Teachers dismissed him as stupid, not worth the time to work with. His mother ended up home schooling him.

Tesla? He discovered how to harness the earth’s own fields to produce unlimited free energy. Even then, this was actually not a new concept, other civilizations and peoples had their ways of doing the same. This is a fascinating rabbit hole to fall down, but far too involved and a little outside the scope of my Substack.

DaVinci? Far ahead of his time, or so we think, in engineering design; the same can be said of so many others that had incredible ideas but the materials technology hadn’t caught up to them yet.

Do I think of myself as normal?

Not a chance.

Why? Because from as early as I can remember, and that is pretty early, I always felt…not like other people. I didn’t want to get together and play dolls with girls. I didn’t really want to play with anyone. I was absolutely fine doing my own thing, all by myself, leave me alone, thanks. Lego, Tinkertoys, those little plastic “bricks”…that was my style. Learning the rudiments of knitting and crocheting. Crafty stuff. Wandering about the farmyard all by myself, in my own head but not really in the land of make-believe. Well, except in the case of that big old concrete/stone barn that was fallen down; we used to play at castles and giants, my brothers and I.

I didn’t like attention, didn’t like team sports, didn’t like being pushed to “do better” at school. Oh, I could, I think it was a matter of not being out to impress anyone, not looking for approval. Ignore me, over here, don’t look, I’ll be fine.

Dr. Seuss, in the dust.

Theodore Seuss Geisel was a genius in opening the world of reading to so many children. His books are fun, no matter what you like reading. Sure, I read those too I’m sure. Before I even got to kindergarten.

How many kids have you heard of that could read Reader’s Digest by the age of 5? How many even have the focus? Sure, I’ll bet Sesame Street had alot to do with it for me, but then why didn’t everyone that watched it learn to read as fast as I did? Kindergarten is sand tables and naps, block toys and learning some letters and numbers. Or in the 1970’s, it was, anyway. It’s certainly evolved since, along with preschool.

Butterflies are pretty.

The real ones, flitting about outside.

Social butterflies? I could not understand the point. I was and still am a very closed-off type. Oh, I’ve learned how to function in society to a relatively good degree, but there are some things that I just cannot tolerate as a regular thing. Public gatherings? Only if there is some very interesting common ground; I hate shopping. Get me in and out of this place as fast as I can manage!

Sales is by far not my strong suit; if I can’t really see a point to something, I sure as hell can’t push it on someone else. Many times, even if I do understand and endorse something, I still have no desire to “sell” it. I feel like other people should be allowed to decide without coercion. It’s their money and their life, after all, that this will affect, and…everyone is different and is living a different situation.

Interviews? Nope. I totally suck at them. It’s all on my resume, at least what I can realistically fit without making it 10 pages long. What the heck else do they really need to know anyway?

Keep me out of town.

After finally living on our acreage for over six years, I have zero inclination to live in any town again. Too many people, too much stimulation, not enough freedom.

Sure, I’m not in the best of shape right now, but that doesn’t mean it will always be this way. I search for answers for that and work away at trying to improve the physical issues. But damned if I’m just going to give up. I don’t do that. I collapse momentarily, lament things for a day or two, then start looking for solutions.

Oh, but the solutions have to come from my own searching, I really hate when people think that they have all the answers for something they might not even have heard of. Or, for that matter, for any part of my life revolving around the acreage, they think they have all the answers for the issues here. It might have worked for them, but their life and their location are not the same as mine.

Conformity is hell.

Why would anyone want to conform? It feels like prison, to those like me. Intellectually, emotionally, mentally, even physically in certain ways.

Follow the yellow brick road to some imagined utopia, where nothing bad happens ever. But at the other end of the spectrum, what if nothing really good happens, either? You can’t have it both ways; where there is one, there must exist the other. Or neither, and I really think we wouldn’t want that. I don’t.

Not even nature works that way. For something to live, another thing must die. Indigenous cultures based their entire societies on this very principle; nothing is forever. Humans are part of this, no matter how we try to forget it, try to separate ourselves from it, nothing and nobody is above it.

But within that framework, anything is possible. Miracles can happen. But they won’t all be in some grand sense, they are most often in the very small things that are around us every day, we just forgot how to see them.

We are the miracle.

Every single human. Even the “different” ones. Especially the different ones. And we are all different, because we should be.

Go out and be your different self. Let nobody rain on that wild parade.

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