Thursday, July 22, 2010

according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle, conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern

that is what websters says is normal.

after the mathematical definition of course...

I'll start with afternoon when in conversation i uncomfortably heard my mother describe the difference between sara on aderol, and sara off aderol.

sara when she's herself, and sara when she can actually get things done.

like normal people.

we knew I had a.d.d. from an early age. my parents knew before i did. they didn't want me to be labeled. if i could survive without the medications then thats what i would do.

until i stopped being able to, that is until my grades no longer matched my intelligence.

when i was little i thought that spacing off was normal. i thought everybody did it. i didn't realize that everyone else could keep track of time, and finish tasks directly after them being given them.
in the first grade i had no idea what was going on and wondered how everyone else seemed to figure things out before i did.

by the time i got to high school and it was painfully apparent that i needed to be on some form of medication if i expected to graduate high school i felt relieved. but when i actually heard the doctor say "yup she has all the symptoms. i'm prescribing 20 mg of aderol a day."

i felt broken. it had been made official that there was something ABnormal about my brain that made fluent cognitive function difficult to attain in the least. there is no train of thought i will have that will not derail. its one of the reasons i enjoy blogging so much. i get all my thoughts out at once before i forget where i'm going or what i'm doing.

but the truth is i've never felt normal. i've either been too smart, or too fat, or too tall, too broad, to weird, too technical, too literal, too artistic, too feminine, too androgenous, too much or little of anything that everyone else said i needed to be.

the fault lies with myself as much as others. they should not be comparing me to themselves, nor should i be comparing myself to them. its to Christ i need to compare myself to. how do i measure up?

i hate my aderol. it makes me feel weird physically, and i become a robot, unable to exude the emotion i feel in quite the right way.

but the other day i was studying my dear friends' scott and nikki's baby Brooklyn. she is so so so so so so joyfully human. and i've fallen in love with that. i find myself watching more and more babies just to see if they all act so very human.

what i mean by that is that she is completely uninhibited in the emotion she portrays or feels. when she feels happy you can tell, when she feels sad you can tell. there is not a beat between thought and reaction for her. and why should there be? it won't be until she gets older that someone will say "you shouldn't laugh at that" or "you ought to be glad" it won't be until she's older that she'll realize that the world holds a different definition of how she should feel, and from that moment on she will measure her reactions as we all do. i dread that day for her.

but for now she's the most genuine thing on the planet.

today more than any other day i realized that the kids i work with at hilltop each struggle with their own definitions of normalcy. there are more than a few that struggle with differences in themselves that inhibit their relationships with others. some suffer from emotional differences, others physical. one particular girl Saba is Muslim. and if she hasn't experienced it yet there will come a day when she feels a separation between her and everyone else due to that religion, or possibly being the only indian girl in a class filled with white girls. someday she'll feel it if she hasn't already.

will saba feel broken because she isn't normal?
at least what she will perceive as normal because of her environment.

we're all broken, but why do we feel inferior to other humans when we realize it?

why can't i see others broken ness? is it because they hide it well?

or because they're human and its just that obvious.

how do i look like them, do i just live without inhibition, or increase it?

why do i want to look like them?

i wnat these kids to be able to play together and laugh together and just be normal kids together. but they won't let each other be normal because of the things that make them different.

i know that i am to comopare myself to Christ, but its so hard sometimes with all of these physical people in front of my eyes to compare myself to.

i guess there is no conclusion to this blog. im still contemplating on what normal is and why i can't figure out how to "be" it.

i've been outcasted for my presumed faults of every kind

how they thought i looked
how they perceived me sexually
intellectually
emotionally
religiously

its just frustrating and it hurts to think of my own abnormality, and then to see other people struggle with similar problems. i don't want them to feel abnormal. i don't want them to feel how i felt in high school.

but maybe thats human too.

1 comment:

  1. I'm gonna risk being completely cliche, and tell you, that there is no normal. Yeah, some people fit in better than others, in certain environments. I've definitely struggled with being "the weird girl" for some amount of time in my life. I've just had to find the right place for me, physically, socially, spiritually, etc. And then, at some point in time, the easiest thing is really just to be you., because it's so much easier to be accepted as you by some, than to be accepted as some image by everyone. There's nothing abnormal about you. Everyone has abnormalities in different areas. Mine is my inablity to relate to people. Yours happens to be your attention span. You know what I've realized about ADD? It's not that ADD kids can't pay attention to anything, the problem is, they pay attention to everything. The teacher's shoe is untied. There's a blue jay on the tree outside, and Bobby won't stop sniffing Suzy's hair. That's good detective work, right there. You are a real woman, with a sense of humor, a beautiful faith and face! You are so gosh-darn smart, and so independent of others' approval. I know you know all this. And I understand getting down on yourself once in a while; it happens to everyone. Nothing, NOTHING says that you're not as good as the rest of them. And I have a feeling that if you can get it, you can help all the other "weird kids" get it too.

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