Navigating a world where you’re not “normal”

Realising I don't have to fit in

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Hello friends,

I’m not “normal”. I know this because many people have told me I’m not and when I look at how I live, compared to most people, I don’t fit with the norm.

There are many reasons why I have been told I’m not normal. The one that provokes people to tell me this the most often, is that I chose to remain a child-free woman and never wanted to be a mother. Then there’s the fact that I chose to break off my relationship with my own mother. That I don’t really do small talk but will happily talk about death and ideas about the nature of reality. I have no home and I don’t buy loads of stuff.

Growing up in a violent and abusive family whose main communication mode was shouting, I wasn't normal as I was too quiet, I cried too often, I was too sensitive and over-emotional. I stayed in my room reading books then once I was old enough stayed out of the house as much as I could.

When I left school at 16 and started working in office jobs I just stumbled into as I needed money to leave home, I questioned things too often. I didn’t just do as I was told if I thought it wasn’t right or could be done differently to make it easier, quicker, or make more sense. I didn’t fit in with the cliques and I didn’t wear the right corporate clothes. I didn’t like being told when I could and couldn’t do things. It all seemed very wrong. But I kept on trying to fit in, to mould myself into a “normal” person who just went along with it all.

Then, in my thirties, I spent 18 months working for one of the world’s largest technology companies where, when I handed my notice in to move to another department, I was told by my boss, “You don’t think enough about what’s best for the company and instead think about yourself.” I don’t know if that’s normal or not, but I just knew that this life we were being sold of economic slavery in jobs where they expected me to do the work of three people from 8am to 6pm in the office and be available on email at all times, take very occasional short holidays, buy stuff I didn't need, and worry about what the future might bring, really wasn't the one for me. I did one more contract job after leaving that technology company and then, in 2010, I went self-employed and have worked from home ever since.

It took some years to break free from the conditioning, but after a while I realised I had stopped trying to fit in. I no longer took on freelance writing jobs where I felt like I had to revert to that role I’d been playing while working in corporate communications. I stopped pretending to be anything other than what I am, which is an introvert who likes to spend a lot of time alone making up stories and who doesn't want to talk about mortgage rates or soap operas or the latest political scandal, but would rather just be really silly and talk nonsense or discuss the really big things like how can we ever know what is real for other people and why are we here, how did we get here, where might we go next, what else is out there?

But then when I got involved with the fiction publishing world, there were more boxes I was expected to fit into. When submitting my first novel to literary agents I got many full manuscript requests and had many conversations with agents about that book and the ideas for my next one. Every single one of them said my next book was too different from the first. That I should write another one more like that one so that I could be more easily branded, so readers would know what to expect from me. But I can’t work like that. The novels I write are the ones that burn in me and have to come out. I can’t not write them because they don’t fit, and I can’t write something else to order because it does.

So I published that first novel with an indie, who ripped me off, and then by the time I’d written the second one that was too different from the first, I had started my own little press and I published it myself. Now I am just starting work on a new novel and I am not even thinking about the publication part, I’m writing it because I love writing and the characters have come to me asking for their story to be written. I realise that probably doesn't sound “normal” but, like I said, I’m not!

This quote from Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment always helps me to remember that being is a misfit is okay.

“Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.”

I’m not an enlightened being but everything in my life is much lighter since I woke up from unconsciousness and accepted being different to the norm. So if you ever feel like you don’t fit in, just remember that you don’t have to. It’s when I stopped trying to that everything fell into place and my life became the best it’s ever been.

With love,

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