But normal
I watched everyone around me, moving, talking, growing, and living; frozen in my bones, paused in time. It took a year for my body to heal and catch back up to my mind alone. I can’t help but feel anything but behind, out of my breath and incapable of catching up. I try to remind myself life isn’t a race, there’s milestones and goals but each unique to our own lives. What good would life be if we all lived the same one. Yet, I still find myself gasping for air and reaching for a helping hand. Willing to give any and everything to feel a bit less apart from the crowd.
Born into a world of eight billion people. None made the same, to look, do, or feel either. So why? Why do I find myself engraving this concept of superiority aligned with similarity into the grooves of my brain? Tormenting myself with the replays of being told I’m unfixable; diagnosed with four chronic illnesses, one of which an incurable autoimmune disease with no treatment plan and no research. Essentially announcing to a stadium that I will never be normal, never in my life no matter how hard I try.
I find myself consistently reminded. Catching a reflection of my scars in water, mirrors and windows. Fast admissions, last minute procedures or calls from the hospital saying my blood tests remain outside of range. Highlighting and adding bold to the font my life is written in, circled and underlined with an exclamation point that I’m unfixable and abnormal.
I stand here, in my chaos. With gusts of wind blowing my hair, fair and the resemblance of the sand in color, around my face, stuck to the gloss that glazes my lips. Overwhelmed by my pure existence and all around me in any given moment. White chunky headphones tangled by a wire and outdated by the teens that now endeavor through the awkward stages of middle school, grip the inside of my ears, the left one hanging loose over grazing my cheek with the wind; the only thing that can blast cohesive noise loud enough to block out the storm that hovers the print of my story book and bring my feet to the ground and light to my world.
Within music I find my normalcy. Reminded through shared experience feeling and chaos that while all made equally different, each holding the ability to share the experience of unnerved and unknown paths life will push us down. I am reminded that we are not made to be the same. That we each hold space, and in ourselves are normal. Normal in experiencing life for the first time. Normal in giving life our best and that being all we can give it. Normal in feeling; the good the bad, the new the old. Common or rare, we experience life through emotion and connection through sharing those. Supporting others in past shared experience or asking a helping hand when walking down a path for the first time.
Life. Raw, unknown and uncommon. But beautiful and admirable in of itself and all its antonyms to normal. I don’t know why everyone wants to be normal. Why I want to be normal. I don’t know if that feeling will ever be a distant one, but for the sake of embracing life being born to live it, I hope it becomes but a memory. One so distant I nearly forget it, not far enough to make me feel the need to experience it again however. Just far enough, to stay a reminder for how lucky I am to be not normal, and to share my embracement of my uniqueness with the world.
