“A head like yours is supposed to hurt.”  That’s what my father would always say whenever I had a headache.  I can’t remember if he ever substituted other body parts when they were hurting, but I heard that specific phrase so often growing up that, even now, almost 50 years later, my soulmate often hears it whenever I have a migraine.  It’s just one of the dozens of eccentric sayings that he would say and that I would eventually adopt.  Some I would even repeat, to a chorus of strange looks from my classmates and friends, but to me, it was strange that they didn’t have these (or any other sayings) from their parents.  

As I went through elementary and junior high school, I would grab every story I could get my hands on – TV shows, movies, books, games, comics – and I would memorize every aspect and character in them as best I could.  They were living in different worlds, and I would learn their lessons, incorporate them into myself, and try to live as Encyclopedia Brown, who could solve any mystery with a single question. I would meditate on the injustice of being a chaotic good dark elf in a world where lawful evil human assassins are more accepted, and I would follow along with Qwill and his cats as they solved murders and completely misrepresented how smart and friendly cats were. They were all people who, like me, had little in common with those around them.  

These stories prepared me for when my parents divorced when I was in sixth grade. I knew exactly what to expect.  My siblings and I would be dragged into a packed courtroom one by one, sobbing our eyes out, while the judge coldly sits on his high chair and asks us which parent we wanted to live with.  We would shuffle back and forth between two houses – maybe even two schools! – and our parents would bribe us while throwing barbed curses at each other.  

But that never happened.  Instead, I had to go, separately and with my siblings, to some sort of court-mandated therapy with a nun/family counselor who refused to accept that yes, I’m fine, and yes, I know both of my parents love me, and yes I know it’s not my fault so can I please just go back to my books?  There would be no courtroom and no bribes because my mother would instead disappear for the vast majority of the time, and my dad would keep the kids, keep the house, and have to work extra hours every day and on weekends to make up for the missing income.  Whenever I needed money for anything, I would earn it myself (all while throwing half of what I made into my dad’s pocket to help out).  It was only when I hung out with my friends, the ones that didn’t have to work to pay for school supplies, and got the newest toys and games for Christmas instead of socks and underwear, that I noticed that my experiences were not only severely skewed, but were also completely invisible to the vast majority of people.  That was when I realized that the problem comes from seeing things as “normal”.

The truth is, there is no such thing as normal.  What people call normal is just a collection of somewhat common life experiences that were either talked about or experienced by them, and which therefore becomes that individual’s default expectations.  While by itself, this does not pose a problem, it can become a huge issue when that individual is faced with a person who doesn’t have those same defaults.  I believe that most conflicts that humans face could be more peacefully resolved if people would just stop acting as if there is some universal “normal”.

Every single person starts with their own issues, their own struggles, and their own personal pluses and minuses that change how they see things and how they react to things.  Added to that are environmental, societal, and economic advantages and disadvantages that change what options they may have and what results from those options.  These all come together to shape the various people, places, and events of that single individual’s life.  So why, when faced with such obviously complex variables, do so many people insist that everyone should still somehow filter through a single generic path?

And this isn’t even just about society as a whole – this is a problem on the individual level as well.  My ex-best friend used to constantly say to me, “You can’t do that, or you’ll never get a girl” over and over, where the word “that” would mean anything from wearing a specific tee shirt to reading fantasy and sci-fi novels to everything else he deemed a non-starter when trying to attract a mate.  The one thing that he said it most often about was video games – “you can’t tell them you play video games!”  Now, ignoring the obvious microaggression inherent in assuming that girls wouldn’t also be interested in video games, the key point he was trying to drive through to me was that there were things that I had to be, and more importantly, things I strictly cannot be, in order to be accepted by a person I wanted to be with.  

But the funny thing was that he could never counter my response – if the person I was interested in didn’t like that I played video games and didn’t like the things I liked, why would I still want to be with them?  I can’t count the amount of times I’ve watched people let their family, friends, and even random strangers dictate how they should act or what they want, all because “that’s just what you have to do” or because “that’s what growing up is all about”.  To me, the rule was simpler – “As long as you’re not hurting anyone, it doesn’t matter what other people think.”  

Now, this is not to say that neglect or abuse are in any way, shape or form acceptable.  There will always be absolute moral, societal, and legal requirements that one must uphold to maintain one’s ability to remain in society.  Just because there is no real “normal” way to raise a child due to various differing cultural, religious, or community standards, that does not give people the right to beat or abuse their children, nor does it excuse them from the consequences of their actions.  Just as with everything else, your right to choose your own path stops the second your path crosses the path of others.  

More and more in today’s world, we are being asked to think of and accept certain aspects of our current state of affairs as the “new normal.”  The word normal is defined as “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected”.  Should we call a constantly-conflicted and severely divided nation usual or expected?  Should a pandemic that has killed almost seven million human beings worldwide while infecting over 775 million others ever be considered typical?  Perhaps we should stop pushing these rules about absolute conformity to outdated standards, and instead celebrate the very thing that makes us all human – our diverse and ever-expanding differences.