“Normal”

I just read the news about how Charice’s grandma feels ashamed for how she looks right now. And I feel really sad for Charice.

My grandmother was also the one who brought me up, but never even once I heard her say that she’s sad or shameful for what I ended up looking or of my preference despite however weird my preference are to other people.

When I started wearing tattered clothes and jeans to achieve a goth punk look when I was in high school, she never told me that I should wear proper clothes like “normal” people do. Instead, when I showed her the clothes I bought online, she told me that they’re “beautiful” and that they’re “unique” and “cool.”

The problem is with most people is that they try so hard to fit into society or what society dictates to as “normal.” If you don’t fit to what “normal” is, you will immediately be a subject of ridicule by people. What is “normal,” anyway? Who sets these rules? Isn’t it also us, the society, who restricts ourselves and those around us? This “normality” just gives people who fit into their self-proclaimed standards the excuse to treat people who are unlike them badly, and most often than not, cruelly. But in the end, “normal” is still subjective. What might be normal to you and me, may not be normal to others.

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
—Morticia Addams

I think everything just falls more on acceptance and tolerance of other people, what they believe, who they are, and what they wanted to be. There’s nothing wrong with not fitting in with the crowd or their opinion. It doesn’t make us less human. In fact, it makes us even more human than most because we understand what “normal” people do not, and we feel for what “normal” people refuse to understand.