Normal is Weird

(Originally Written in 2015 for context)

In this day and age, normal is weird. What defines weirdness, really? Thirty years ago it may have been to be a person who wore hipster glasses that had tape in the center or suspenders, a nerd. Maybe, it was that one kid in the background that gave people odd looks but never said anything to anyone. Maybe, it was the woman that had fifteen cats and never married.

But what about now… with the 90s came the unorthodoxy era; grunge-style dominated, and conforming to the art of not conforming became the goal. If you were different, you were now celebrated. This practice has only increased in the millennium years and now the 2010s.

If you are a crazy cat woman, that’s okay because the internet loves cats. If you are nerdy, you can rest easy, because there are hipsters, bronies, otakus, mathletes, Goths, and more you can fit yourself into. If you are a guy who likes Barbies or a girl who likes GI Joe, that’s okay too, because who cares what others think.

I am weird; I know it. I was born with an old-soul and have always related better to adults than kids my age. I love Jesus, cats, anime, the 1920s, cameo, antiques, dresses, lace, the Saints, the Big Bang Theory, thrift stores, and I make cookies and muffins for a living, but to many people, that’s not weird. That’s just who I am.

I am weird; by the year 2006, I became aware that my personality wasn’t my only one. When my friends began bringing up the names “Xena,” “Rin,” and “Nicki” again and again and blacking out occurred more than once a day, I knew I was weird. But to some, that’s not weird. It’s DID, dissociative identity disorder.

I am weird; my father has so many ethnicities in his blood—mainly European—that they categorize me as Caucasian, but my mom is a native-born Mexican. So with my blond hair and blue-green eyes, I am the “whitest” half-Mexican my friends have ever seen and many acquaintances have questioned my ethnicity when it is mentioned. Still, even this to many isn’t weird. More and more people are coming to be identified as half this and half that, or a quarter this, an eighth that…

I am weird, but to many, I am not weird. In fact, to many, I’m rather normal. But then what is normal, really? We are a generation so defined in not being defined that the term normal is no longer a term used to generalize an accepted group of individuals anymore. White isn’t white, and black isn’t black. The line between normal and weird is now grey.

Some may say that normal is to have common courtesy, common sense, or even a common calling. But common courtesy isn’t so common anymore, not in a society where men, opening doors for women, is now sexist and not when a “God Bless You” in response to a sneeze is considered religious intolerance. Common sense is almost non-existent, when warning labels telling people not to siphon gas with their mouths or not to sleep with a hair dryer left on are needed. Even a common calling isn’t present; we are about as unified as a nation as there are different people in it. Each person supports one interest or another, but if we are unified at all, it is in the fact that we are all equally so different.

So what is normal? Really, what is normal; because it isn’t like the dictionary may have defined as usual, natural, or ordinary. Nowadays, there is nothing ordinary about being “normal” because being normal now is to be weird, to be diverse, to be yourself. So really, normal… is weird.