I am normal, just like usual. I am like everyone else, and everyone else is like me. When you ask me how I am, I will say “I am fine”. To be normal is to have the same sorts of problems everyone else has, to look as uninteresting as possible, to speak and act in ways that do not set you apart. Normal is conformist. Normal is good.
Or is normal a relative figure of speech? If I am normal one day, could I be abnormal the next? If normal is a way of saying “steady” and “natural predilection”, and the state of normal is governed by your emotions, isn’t normal a rather scary aspiration? Doesn’t normal seem to hold a very grey sort of connotation?
Grey is not fun. Not fun is not happy. Happiness is the very reason I’m supposed to be normal, right? Why would I want to be normal if it didn’t make me happy? Hopefully, normal will make me happy.
So how normal do you have to be in order to be happy?
Do you have to behave in ways everyone else behaves, even if you don’t agree with those ways? Do you have to hold the same goals, lifestyles, methods of communication, and personality types of “normal people ” in order to appear normal? Does every thought, revealed or otherwise, have to conform to a certain set of unwritten guidelines? As a rule, would abnormal people be fluctuating, erratic people so controlled by their wildly-haphazard emotions that they would be nearly unapproachable on even professional levels, never mind friendly encounters? I would not like to be one of those people.
Yet…there is something vaguely persuasive about such a person. This person does not bend and sway with the crowd. This person stands firm in their singularity, holding the banner of anti-conformity, signalling with the brazen nonchalance of someone who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of them. They do not have to fit in. They do not have to run with the crowd. And they certainly aren’t normal. But they have a mysterious appeal, a lingering sensation of delight, drawing you towards them with hesitant, joyful steps.
I think I would like to be one of these sorts of people after all.
I don’t think I want to be normal.
Leave a Reply