Don’t read this if you are happy living a normal life
Warning: self-therapy alert. If you have a great normal life, perfectly happy, then this will not be relevant for you. But if you ever felt the pressure to be normal but then wondered why it is not so great, then this is for you.
I chased being normal: feeling I belong, doing what everyone else does and following what society says is the path to success. I achieved this normal and I was utterly miserable.
Only when I gave up on trying to be normal, I could be free to seek real meaning for myself. I am much happier ignoring whether what I do and believe is normal or not.
I preferred playing chess with myself instead of hanging out with the neighborhood gang of kids. I did not understand interactions with other children very well. And I only sometimes enjoyed them. I had a younger brother. This should have taught me to socialize from an early age. But we did not have a good relationship when we were little. He liked annoying me. I liked doing stuff alone.
I was full of weird contradictions. For example I was disorganized and my room was a mess. But one summer when I was 8 y.o., I decided to rearrange all the books in the living room. There were about 400 books. I spent a valiant three weeks of my precious summer vacation trying to reorganize them by genre, then by author name, then by style. I did not even finish.
