Normal

I’ve been thinking again about the pernicious power of the word normal. The idea that there is some acceptable way that we should be in the world, or that other people should, is the source of so much misery.

How many teenagers have killed themselves because they didn’t fit in to other people’s idea of how they could be? How many genocides have been committed because other people have not been “normal” like us?

And yet it is all made up. There is no such thing as normal. We are all different and we all see the world differently. The sooner we realise that the happier we will all be.