Day 379 – The End Of Normal

Good Day Loves,

There is so much to write about. I recognize that the length of my most recent blogs has increased by more than 50%. I think that’s a little too long, so I’ll try to keep this one a little shorter. The doctor put me on sick leave for another month and a half, but I’ll write about that another time.

So much has been happening, though. There’s so much to write about. I am exiting the land of the living today and starting a new chapter of life. By going through my entries, my experience with the land of the living should have been titled “The Land of the Dying”. I came out of my cocoon, fluttered around a bit, and realized that I still have a lot of growing and healing to do. The good news is, I know the areas that I need to grow in, and I finally know what has been wrong with me, and where I need to heal!

I want to tell you a story. It is part of the story of my life. All of my life I have been weird. I know, you don’t want to hear that. You want me to say special, or unique, or gifted, but that’s not the case, because that’s not how I have felt. For most of my life, I have felt weird. Different. Alone. I think the first time I remember feeling weird was in kindergarten. I went to a school where I was the only person in my class who looked like me. One day we did an art project. The teacher took pictures of the silhouette of our profiles, so it was our heads from a side view. Then we had to put all of our pictures up on a wall in the classroom… I looked at my picture. I was the only one with a nose like mine. I was the only one with hair like mine. I was the only one with lips like mine. I felt so different. My classmates didn’t say anything about my picture, but to me, it seemed everyone felt uneasy around it. That was my introduction to different.

After kindergarten, I was placed in gifted and talented classes, or honors classes. Two days a week, me and another boy would take a bus to some other school and we would do weird stuff like work with blocks and rubics cubes. The program was called SPIRAL. We would do math puzzles and just talk about ideas with the teachers. We never talked about ideas at regular school. The teachers just told us what to do. It was nothing like regular school. Me and the boy both knew that we were different. Weird. When we came back to regular school, we never talked about what we did in SPIRAL. In third grade, my teacher had a bookshelf and the students would check out books to read. There were just little kid books. When I went to check out a kiddie book, I remember my teacher recommended something else. She gave me TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES to read. I knew that it wasn’t a regular kid book. I would read that book again as a classroom book in college. By the time I got to fifth grade, I was going to SPIRAL twice a week and then I had another class at my regular school that I went to. I didn’t even know what it was for. All I knew is that when the other kids went to PE and music, I went to this weird class with blocks and games. I didn’t like being different. I wanted to be normal.

When I was eleven, I went to middle school. My middle school didn’t have SPIRAL or the weird class, and the many of the kids looked like me. I took all my electives with regular kids and then I took my core classes like English and Math with “honors” kids. But I was always one of the smartest in class. The kids would look at me funny. I always knew the answers to stuff. Soon, I stopped raising my hand when the teacher would ask questions. I stopped telling people the grades that I made on tests, and I started trying to fit in. I wasn’t really interested in most of the conversations I’d have with my “friends”. They were nothing like the conversations I used to have with my SPIRAL teachers. But at least I had friends and at least people didn’t know that I was weird anymore. I got a journal, and in my journal, I would write my real thoughts. I would tell my journal who I really was. Every now and then, one of my peers would tell me I was “smart” and I would hate it. I wanted to be normal.

When I got to high school, I told my mom that I didn’t want to be in honors classes any more. I wanted to be with the normal kids. And so I was. The normal kids in high school turned into the normal kids in college. They accepted me, but they, too, always thought I was a bit weird. I liked to study stuff until I understood it. At one point I was very religious, even behind closed doors… Around college age, weird things started happening to me. Random people would come up to me and tell me things about my life. I remember being on campus once. This guy who worked in the interfaith chapel came up to me. He was a preacher or something. He told me that I had a calling on my life and that he could recognize it. I wasn’t interested in preachers or the idea of a “calling”, but he wasn’t the only one that told me that. It seemed like everywhere I went, at least three times a year since college, I would be approached by someone who I thought was a weirdo, who would want to read my palms or bring me to their religion or tell me that I had some kind of work to do with my life or some kind of calling. Preachers, Imams, priests, mystics and so-called prophets would go out of their way to engage me in conversation. Teachers would take a special interest in me. Men of power and prestige would court me. I shunned them all. I wanted to be normal. Yet, try as I did, I never fit in with normal. I always knew it. Me and my journal. We knew that I wasn’t normal. But I wanted to be! And, boy, did I try.

I formed an allegiance with all things normal. I refused to be friends with the elitist people who would invite me to their events when I got to grad school. By now, people had started thinking I was pretty, so I dressed down so that I didn’t stand out… I went above and beyond to show that I didn’t think I was better than anyone. I went above and beyond to not have what normal people didn’t have…

This has been the story of my life. Until now. I have come to a point where I can no longer pretend. If I tell you all that has happened since my last entry, then this blog will run too long. But suffice it to say that this weekend I was blessed with the realization and the admission that I am not normal, whatever normal is… It’s just not me. I have been in denial for far too long. I have been wanting to be normal and wanting to be me at the same time, and there is conflict there. Because I am not normal. I am different. It doesn’t mean better. It doesn’t mean good or bad. It means that what motivates me is not necessarily the things that my culture and upbringing would say are supposed to motivate me. It means that the teachers and preachers and mystics were right. I have always felt like my life isn’t quite my own. I mean, I like things just as much as the next person, but for the past few years, I have had no interest in the pursuit of things. The underlying thought that sits in my subconscious mind is “I have work to do. And I dare say what I know: part of the reason that my body has been so off balance and my energy has been so low is because I have been refusing to step into the Truth of who I am and do the work that I have been called to do. The so-called prophets and teachers were right.

I am not normal.

It just has to be OK. It goes without saying. Anyone who starts a company, writes a book, invents something or adds light to this place we call Earth is not normal by default. They are doing something that most people aren’t purposefully doing. Yet. They are living purposefully. It’s not what we’re taught to do. It’s weird. And it’s finally OK with me. There is no more conflict. I still Love the normal people. I still have a connection with them. At the end of the day, we are all connected. I have seen so much, God. I have been so much. I have been everything except special, unique, gifted, talented, honored, great. I have looked at those words with disdain and shame as if it’s a bad thing to be great. But what if you are great? What if you have really have work to do? What if you really are one of those people who is going to write the kind of books that you love to read? What if you are ready to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles when you are eight years old? What are you gonna do about it? Shall we pretend to be less than who we are forever?

My body won’t have it anymore. My Spirit won’t have it anymore. I take off the cloak that I have been wearing. Yes, I have been trying not to shine, but it is my destiny to shine. I know this like I know my own name. And so I step into my destiny. Goodbye normal. Hello Me…

Ameen.

Day 379
The End Of Normal