Nobody is normal. Normal is just the loudest performance.

I spent a long time trying to be normal.

I studied it carefully. The way normal people moved through social situations without apparent effort. The way they said the right thing without calculating it first. The way they seemed to belong everywhere they went without the constant low level anxiety of wondering whether they were doing it correctly.

I practiced. I adjusted. I performed.

And I got quite good at it. Good enough that most people had no idea. Good enough that I sometimes forgot myself, briefly, that the version of me they were seeing was not quite the real one.

But here is what I eventually realised. The people I was watching, the ones who seemed so effortlessly normal, were also performing. Just a different performance. One they had practiced for so long it had become unconscious.

Normal is not a natural state. It is a social agreement. A set of behaviours and responses that a particular group at a particular time has decided represent the acceptable centre. And that centre shifts constantly. What was normal fifty years ago would be considered strange today. What is normal in one country is baffling in another. What is normal in one social group is alienating in another.

Normal is not real. It is the loudest performance in the room.

The neurodivergent experience is often framed as a deviation from normal. A deficit. A disorder. Something to be corrected or managed or medicated into compliance with the agreed upon centre.

But what if we reframed it entirely. What if neurodivergent people are not failed versions of normal but simply people whose nervous systems never learned to perform that particular agreement convincingly. Not because something went wrong. But because we were always oriented toward something different. Something more honest. Something less performed.

The world loses something when it only makes room for one kind of mind. It loses the spiral thinkers and the deep feelers and the ones who ask why when everyone else accepts because. It loses the people who cannot pretend and therefore do not, which makes them the most honest people in any room they enter.

You were never a failed normal person.

You were always something else entirely. And the world needs that something else far more than it needs another perfect performance of the centre.

Stop performing normal. It was never yours to perform. 🌿