As we saw earlier, the antidote to the hypnotizing influence of normality is authenticity: finding meaning in one’s inner experience, unobscured by societally promulgated fictions—prime among them what Daniel Siegel calls “the lie of the separate solo self.” That falsehood is the ultimate abnormality. From where I stand, a life devoted to seeing through such a traumatizing nontruth, dwelling and creating outside its bounds, is a life lived well.
