I Stopped Trying to Be Normal — Here's What I Found

There is something very strange about the word "normal." We use it every day as if it were a fact of nature. We say, "That is normal," or, "This is not normal," or, "People should behave normally." But if I stop for a moment and ask who decided what normal means, the whole thing becomes idiotic, because nature does not seem to have a committee called "normality." A tree does not sit together and decide how tall a tree should be. Right? But human beings do this consistently and constantly. We create rules. We repeat them for generations, punish people who break them, and reward people who follow them. And then, eventually, we forget that we created the rules ourselves. This is the most idiotic and absurd part of it. We build the cage, live inside it for so long, and then call the cage "reality."

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? For me, this is the first thing we have to understand about society and normality. Normal does not necessarily mean true. Very often, normal simply means familiar. If 100 people do something and one person does something different, we immediately become suspicious of that one person. Why? Not because the one person is necessarily wrong. Simply because the other 99 are used to seeing the same thing. Imagine walking into a room where everyone is wearing white clothes. One person enters wearing black. Immediately, people notice the black clothes. Nobody asks, "Why is white the truth?" They simply ask, "Why is that person wearing black clothes and being different?" This is how society works: difference becomes suspicious before it becomes understandable. And this is where the entire problem begins.

Society needs some kind of order. I understand that. Without shared rules, ordinary life would become difficult. We need agreements about traffic, money, languages, property, and all that stuff. But slowly, something stupid happens. A useful agreement becomes a moral rule. A moral rule becomes a social expectation. A social expectation becomes tradition. And tradition becomes identity. And eventually, nobody remembers that it was an agreement in the first place. Now it feels like truth.

Take something very simple. A person grows up hearing that a successful life means studying, getting a job, earning money, getting married, and all the blah blah blah stuff. Nobody necessarily proves this. It is simply repeated. The child sees parents doing it, teachers talk about it, relatives talk about it, and advertisements talk about it. And it sees that society rewards people who follow the pattern. So the child grows up thinking this is life. But is it life? Or is it simply one particular agreement of life that has been repeated so many times that it looks natural? That distinction is very important, because repetition is one of the strongest forces in human existence. If I hear something once, I question it. If I hear it 100 times, I begin to recognize it. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? If I hear it for 20 years, I may defend it. And if everyone around me believes it, I may become angry when someone questions it. This is how an idea becomes a prison without needing walls.

Society does not always control us by force. Very often, society controls us through idiotic ways called approval. That much is very clever, actually. If I behave according to expectations, people will smile. If I dress according to expectations, people will like it. If I choose the career that is respectable, people will congratulate me. We all have seen that, right? When a son or a daughter says, "I'm going to become an engineer or a doctor," society is like, "Wow, you must become like them." But the moment you say, "I'm going to become a pianist or an artist or a teacher," society is like, "What? Are you out of your mind?" This is what society thinks, right? If I marry at an expected age, people become happy. If I live a life the way people say, people consider it very good. But if I suddenly say I do not want this life, everything changes. People start asking questions. "What happened? Are you okay? What are you doing? What will people think?"

Look at the last question: "What will people think?" It is one of the most powerful sentences in human society. Notice how idiotic it is. My life is happening inside my own experience, but I am often more afraid of the opinions of people who are not even living it. Is this not stupidity and absurdity? I may hate my job, but I continue because people respect the job. I may not want a relationship, but I enter one because everyone expects it. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Then one day I realized something stupid: I was not living my life. I was performing a socially acceptable version of it. This is why many people leave their corporate jobs, and many people even leave organizations to live a very normal life, because they understand that it is through peace that one becomes happy, not through happiness that one becomes happy. That distinction is very important: it is through peace that one becomes happy, and not through happiness that one becomes happy.

This is why society has so much power over the individual. It does not have to stand in front of me every morning with a stick. It only needs to put a voice inside my head. Then I will punish myself. This is perhaps the darkest joke of all. Eventually, society does not need to tell me what to do. I tell myself what to do. I become the policeman and the prisoner at the same time.

This is why the word "normal" deserves suspicion. Whenever someone says, "This is not normal," I want to ask: normal according to whom? According to biology? According to statistics? Or according to a tradition, religion, family, and things like that? These are not the same things. A behavior can be uncommon without being wrong. A behavior can be common without being wise. After all, a crowd does not become intelligent simply because it becomes larger. A thousand people repeating the same sentence does not create truth. We all have to see this for ourselves, because you are the self-aware reality which is the origin of all origins and that is running this entire show. But we want to remain pathetic creatures following spirituality, following this or that, and things like that.

A noise trying to search for silence will only make more noise. A shadow trying to see light will only meet shadows. A dreamer trying to meditate will only keep dreaming. Turn your mind within and just see for yourself that you have always been in the unblemished awareness and nothing else. Then you will laugh at all those dramas that you have been doing in your life. You will laugh at all those practices that you did to know who you are, because it is like a woman practicing so much to become a woman. Traveling across the world in order to learn how to be a woman. Attending different Zoom calls, seminars on becoming a woman. And finally realizing that she was always a woman. How would her mentality and mind be at that time? She would laugh or regret all those things that she has done so far, because she wasted her time. That is what will happen. So turn your mind within and see for yourself that you have nothing else but truth, the reality.