I Don’t Want To Be Normal

Thoughts from the 1980’s

Yesterday I realised so much about myself I have woken today like a dragon. I don’t mean angry dragon, just one breathing fire. I feel I have been holding myself back for years, living this crazy half life.

Years ago I did things without realising the consequences, and ended up sexually castrated myself – not physically, but certainly effectively.

Part of the reason for my violence against myself – and if you look around you can see it everywhere in others who act violently against themselves even if it is in an internal way as I did – is that I lost all respect for my elders and authority figures. I lost all respect for the ordinary, normal people around me. I didn’t want to be normal – like those I saw murdering each other either in body in the thousands as I lived through World War Two, or in the way they related to each other. I see it here in this tiny hamlet where I live, neighbour turned against neighbour. And I still don’t want to be normal like that. Perhaps those you see quietly dying around you didn’t have the courage to feel the agony of that, and so in a quiet self-murder allowed themselves to die. It is happening all around us.

As a child in school I was thrashed with sticks as thick as a walking stick, that was in the early 1940’s. I still don’t want to be normal like that. I had a taste of it when I was trying to live a normal married life, and started beating my own children. I killed out love and lived the ‘moral’ sick life of those around me. And it made me ill enough to recognise that something was wrong. Something was very wrong. You too might be experiencing the pain of normalcy. The world is crazy, still on its killing spree. Still locked into its segregation and hatred of anyone or anything different or outside their sphere of understanding or control. Still desperately avoiding any tiny movement toward self awareness, toward actually meeting their own internal craziness.

Well, what I see is that if you have been broken in some way as I was, or you haven’t got the right body shape or skin colour, be proud. Please don’t try to be normal. Normal is sick, grasping, compulsively locked into loveless sex, national aggression, against being part of society, or so lost in consumerism that they are destroying each other and the world.

So stand up, even in a crooked body, and realise you have a doorway to a new life. Your pain of existing in a ‘normal’ society has taught you lessons the normals haven’t even glimpsed.

You know that to survive you have had to find a life inside yourself somewhere. Okay, it may have been a life full of anger or aggression, or loaded with despair. But listen, you also have in you the spirit that has survived despite all of that. Whatever your forebears did, whether they were deceitful and lying or courageous and strong, whether they had honour or were cowards, whatever they did, and perhaps over time they did everything, their lives were the drama that brought us into being. Their lives have given us the substance of our body and our personality. We are the heirs of that drama. What we grew from is what they left us. It was the heritage from the past. Be proud of that and help it to grow. Learn from it and open to the life beyond your distorted self.  See Opening to Life

What I learned was that no matter who I had become, at the core of me I was still an amazing expression of the universe, of life. I had survived whereas as millions had failed in the enormous journey of lives or of the sperm to the ovum. And though birth and life were difficult, here I am, still with that miracle of life beating my heart. I realised if Life in me could do that, then it could do other miracles.

So get hold of that, open to it, let it grow you till what was broken inside is mended. Don’t ever try to be normal though. In that direction lies craziness.