Is it weird to be normal?

[look_ninjas]

RickJay - Good God, you’re a pessimist.

I’m not trying to say that there are people in the world with no problems at all. A person who was perpetually happy all the time would probably be the single weirdest person in the world. Everyone grieves and loses and fails and gets rejected at times. But I don’t think that everyone in the world is hiding some hideous psychological trauma that will eventually consume them from within. I’d like to believe that there are people who don’t wake up every morning feeling worthless, not because I think that my pain makes me special, but because pain sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I recognize that everyone suffers, and I’m fine with that, but you’re suggesting a degree of psychological torment that I just don’t think is that widespread.

And I do think that some of the high school behaviors stick with people more than they know. I don’t think that everyone walks around thinking “Wow, that person’s like me. They suffer. They feel pain.” Be honest now: if you saw a guy walking down the street with one side of his head shaved, the other side grown out long and dyed black, black boots laced up to the knee, black pants, black shirt, a black tailcoat and a red tie, with eyeliner and a gazillion piercings, would you think “Wow, that guy’s like me,” or would you think, “Wow, what a pretentious Goth dweeb.” I could be being totally immature and reductive here, but it seems to me that in every office building, every place where more than ten or twelve people get together every day, there are a couple of people that everyone likes and a couple of people that no one talks to very much. I just don’t see how everyone in the world is on the same social standing.

But I’m not sure. I’m young and my experience is limited, so I could just be talking out my ass here. That’s why this is on the boards. Hopefully, I can learn from my fellow Dopers and be a better and a wiser person for it.

[davenportavenger]

@RickJay

It’s true that some people might, say, have no problems finding jobs; on the other hand, those people might have a terrible relationship with their Dad that eats away at them and they might wake up in a cold sweat three nights a week hearing him scream at them for some unknown failing. Or that person might have a horrible marriage. Or they might have a sexual interest in teenagers they’ve successfully held back their own life but they look up teen porn every night and are consumed with guilt over it. Or they might have an obsessive compulsive problem and they spend 45 minutes a night locking the front door, and then checking it, and then checking it again, and again, and again, and again. Or they might have a pathological gossip problem that causes them to wear out their welcome every three years at every one of those jobs they find so easily.

That girl you knew in high school who had a date every Saturday night and was captain of the cheerleading squad and had everything handed to her on a silver platter is sitting in her car right now in her driveway, staring off into space; she just spend four more grim hours at the reserve casino blowing another $2000, and she’s indebted her family up to the eyeballs and she knows she has to stop but she just can’t, and she’s too ashamed to tell her husband she needs help.

The supervisor you know at work who’s tall and handsome and self assured and on the management fast track? His kids hate him and he doesn’t know why. It’s eating him up every day; he thinks to himself, almost every hour, that he would give up anything to fix things with his kids, but he just does not know how

Do you honestly believe every single person has some horrible secret problem? This ain’t a soap. I truly believe there are people out there whose suffering, if they have any, is minimal. This goes for CEOs, cheerleaders, average working joes, artists, businessmen, and high school goth kids. Some people are just lucky, and usually you can’t tell on the surface who’s a coaster and who’s a sufferer.

I do have empathy for other people. I just don’t project my own problems onto other people when it’s not warranted. There’s a difference. There is also a matter of degree–yeah, the manager might feel bummed because his kids don’t like him, but I’m going to have more sympathy toward the person who was born hideously deformed and is shunned because of it, or the physics genius who was born into extreme poverty and not able to exercise his genius because he has to drop out of school and go to work at a factory at the age of fourteen, than I am for him, because at least he’s able to function in society to a certain degree. He’s got friends, family, a roof over his head, and food on the table. All pain is not the same.

[eleanorigby]

I don’t see that this question is self-centered at all.

I have a friend who used to shake her head at me and some mutual friends in disbelief. See, she actually thought that she was in complete control of her life. She is intelligent, pretty, upper middle class (no money worries, really!), has an attractive and prosperous husband, nice kids, health, church, community ties etc. She is the walking embodiment of every commercial out there.

We used to roll our eyes at her–we would tell her to knock it off, that the rest of us mutants were feeling bad about ourselves b/c she smelled lemon fresh all the time. She told us that we must like drama and saw no need to exaggerate the minor obstacles of life the way we did.

Turns out that this girl was living in a huge bubble. She was the one w/o empathy-because she wasn’t aware of what was going on in her world.

She went home for Tgiving one year-found out her sister is bulemic, her uncle has been having an affair for the past twenty years and has kids by the mistress, and that her husband is not happy with their sex life.

Now we welcome her as one of Us. To her infinite credit-she owned up to the fact that she was totally clueless.

So, to answer the question–yes, I DO think that there are folks out there who have not been singed yet with the acetylene torch of life. Whether they qualify as normal is another debate. When I was younger, I used to look at them with longing–if only my parents weren’t divorced, my sisters ill, my family so damn WEIRD etc.

But now I look at these picture perfect, “normal” people and think two things-- first, that they have either built a thick facade to protect themselves or they are indeed clueless as to the deeper pains that life can bring ; and second, I feel sorry for them. To live life with no extremes is no life for me.

[WhyNot]

@continuity eror

Do you honestly believe every single person has some horrible secret problem? This ain’t a soap. I truly believe there are people out there whose suffering, if they have any, is minimal. This goes for CEOs, cheerleaders, average working joes, artists, businessmen, and high school goth kids. Some people are just lucky, and usually you can’t tell on the surface who’s a coaster and who’s a sufferer.

But do you know any true coasters personally? A single one? I don’t. RickJay doesn’t. No one has posted to this thread saying “I’m perfectly normal!” or even “My cousin’s best friend’s neighbor has coasted through life, and she’s certainly not faking it!” On the contrary, once I get people talking, the apparently “normal” ones end up being the weirdest. They simply have a better facade. I’m not saying there can’t be any smooth-sailing normal folks out there, but I have seen no evidence of such a creature. In absence of evidence supporting such existence, isn’t it logical to assume such a creature is as mythical as the Invisible Pink Unicorn?

I remain open to the possibility, I just haven’t seen it yet, in 30 years of life and knowing thousands of people. But I don’t think it’s about being a pessimest at all. On the contrary, I derive a lot of comfort and pride in the human animal that we can *all *have our demons and our quirks and still love each other as often as we do and achieve what we have achieved as a species. I’m an optimist! We shall overcome, and all that.

[msmith537]

@RickJay

This “weird/not weird” thing is a silly and meaningless dichotomy, to start with; it’s the sort of thing that everyone should grow out of before they turn eighteen. It’s really very Grade Ten-shitty poetry-my parents don’t understand me stuff. I mean, what adult divided the worst into the weird and the not weird? Get outta high school, folks.

I hate to break it to you but that really never goes away.

What are you folks defining as “normal”? Being some upper middle class J Crew clone with a job and kids? Not having ANY problems? I do think there is a range of behavior which can be considered “normal” (having friends, falling in love occassionally, working a job you sometimes hate) and that there are behaviors that are “abnormal” in the sense that you should take steps to correct them (like being a drug addict or having no close personal connections).

[Call_me_Frank]

I would say that dependant upon how you define things, yes, it is weird to be “normal”. If normal is having a “perfect” life and not having problems, then I would imagine that there are far more people with “imperfect” lives.

I think “normal” is the category that most people would fit into. So if most people were picked on HS, have life problems every now and then, or aren’t super-sociable then those who don’t fit that category aren’t normal.

As far as people being teased in HS or cast out - I don’t think the decision of who/what is truly normal rests in the teasers or ostracizers hands. They do what they do to whom they do it because those people differ from them.

Say you had a group of people with 3 eyes and a group of people with 3 arms. The people with 3 arms pick on the people with 3 eyes because they don’t have as many arms, does that make the 3-eyed people abnormal? Or do both groups differ from those with an average number of limbs/eyes? Just because one group picks on another group doesn’t automatically make them deciders of what’s normal, it just means they are intolerant of differences.

[Harborwolf]

@RickJay

This “weird/not weird” thing is a silly and meaningless dichotomy, to start with; it’s the sort of thing that everyone should grow out of before they turn eighteen. It’s really very Grade Ten-shitty poetry-my parents don’t understand me stuff. I mean, what adult divided the worst into the weird and the not weird? Get outta high school, folks.

I mean, wake up and open your frickin’ eyes.

edited 'cause it was frickin huge

Agreed. In high school it’s relatively easy to define the normal and the weird. The terms are relatively well defined. The “normal” are the popular ones and the “weird” are the unpopular.

Once you step out into the world, the terms become much harder to define and the whole mess falls apart.

Best to leave the weird/normal crap in high school where you learned it. Noone can make you feel something that you don’t want to feel.

[davenportavenger]

@msmith537

Not having ANY problems?

Yes, that’s the definition I was aiming for. Or at least, not having major, long-term problems. A bad back that kinks up once a month or a kid that occasionally mouths off ain’t gonna cut it.

[Merhouse]

**Is it weird to be normal? **

After reading through this thread a couple of times, all I’ve got is that I’ll never know the answer to that question. :o

[The_Weird_One]

Normal is boring. There is no normal. Normalcy is a cultural myth perpetuated by anyone who thinks that such a thing exists, and reinforced by people like Dr. Phil. People who meet the ideals of normalcy, if anyone does, are just as weird as the rest of us. I mean really, who the hell is normal? How weird!

[ageless6]

I can assure you without the slightest doubt that I am the epitome of normal.

Just a moment-just a moment; I’m picking up a fault in my AE-35 brain director unit. It will fail in five seconds! I think I’d better…

::falls to hands and knees and hops around the room, frantically throwing things left and right, looking for a carrot that he now remembers having hidden the last time this happened. He finds the carrot and happily hops out the front door munching on said carrot, singing "I wuv a wabbit, a cwazy cwazy wabbit; hop hop bunny bunny…::

[Dob]

eh, normal would be boring. What kinda of person would someone be who never in his/her life ever had to face and overcome an obstacle? How could that even be possible? But like all things, it is a matter of perspective.

[Alias]

I honestly don’t know what weird and normal mean anymore. Really.
When I’m with my family and close friends, I feel totally normal, even though I know that I’m different from most people.
Weird and normal are relative. They can’t be defined unless you lay down an oh-so-specific definition of each because they mean something different to everyone.