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Originally Posted by Hellion
With me it wasn't that I thought I was abnormal or weird that did terrible things to my self esteem, but rather how people treated me for being abnormal or weird....I don't think being 'normal' is a superior state of being.
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Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, a large part of what contributed to my other mental health problems was how other people treated me. I was bullied literally from the first day of primary school (age 5) and it didn't stop until after I'd left school (age 17), which I only did because I couldn't handle the bullying any more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hvert
I wouldn't say that I aspire to being normal, but I'd like to know what normal is, you know (even if no one is really normal)? To at least understand it so I could choose whether I wanted to do my own thing or the normal thing.
I think I have developed bad relationships/friendships in the past because I am not good at identifying what is appropriate behavior. And now that I am starting to think I have a problem with this stuff, I ruminate on it.
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All that I meant by that was that 'normal' is a subjective term. For heterosexuals it is 'normal' to like people of the opposite sex, for homosexuals it is 'normal' to like people of the same sex, for asexuals it is 'normal' to not be sexually attracted to any member of any sex.
There is no one normal, we can only ever be 'normal' in that we are Human beings and we are happy with ourselves as we are. Does that make sense, or am I speaking crap? It is 3AM haha.
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Originally Posted by phaset
I've always thought of normal in terms of the things that "other people" did. Other people:
- Have groups of people they hang out with at school
- Have people at their birthday parties
- Go to dances
- Go to parties
- Have girlfriends
- Go to their prom
- Go to bars
Until last summer when I really started looking into Asperger's I thought my differences were because I missed something important growing up.
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Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at. When you're the one who is different to the majority of people around you, it's very easy to assume that they are 'normal' and you are by definition 'abnormal', when in fact you're both 'normal' but just different to each other.