WHAT IS NORMAL?

Mum just finished reading ‘Veronica decides to die’ by Paulo Coelho. The book rises a question of what is normal, so she asked for my opinion. My initial answer was ’Go ask Alice’, but then I started thinking.

Since medicine became commercialised, our emotions became medicalised. A boy shyness became Social phobia. Only in last decade or two you hear people being anxious or depressed. If the child is eccentric or slow, parents assume he/she is dyslectic, when only, child is stupid and lazy. Is naming or putting a label to a feeling gives closer? Is every feeling a symptom?

Coelho rises an inquiry whether a psychiatric patients and geniuses are normal. Or are ’we’ normal? Mozart, Van Gogh, Galileo were looked as social outcasts at the time. A life driven by the passion to answer one question, an obsession over the muse and a life of unfulfilled romantic love sculptured these people. And yet we still believe that there is a thin line between a genius and a mad man. What if we divorce ourselves from everything we know, from every thought told by our parents, school, everything media fed us and look at the world with new eyes, take in the account that those people are actually normal, what world would that make? If the genius and ’mentally ill’ people made the bigger percentage of the population? More fun!

Ok, this was more of a who’s normal. Lets talk of what is normal? Lets take homosexuality as a paradigm here. Thirty years ago this choice of a lifestyle was considered abnormal, against the moral law. Now it is normal and we are accepted to see it that way, against all our better judgement. But why is it not normal? We are told that we are animals and our ultimate purpose is to mate and reproduce. By this, male and female institution is to believed customary. Two individuals of the same sex is abnormal. Love is normal and healthy and uncontrollable. Two individual of the same sex in love is what?

People attracted to the opposite sex having an opinion are now Homophobes. Now more than ever we are open about our likes and dislikes, our passions, love and fantasies, open to experiments. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

Or is this jus the challenge for the human race? Adam and Eve were perfectly happy, living in a harmony in paradise of Garden of Eden, until one day an apple showed up, symboling a challenge. A guy named Jesus was sent on Earth to clean up after those two. But what was it exactly they did,? Why was it so wrong? And if it was such a big No No, why was there an apple in the first place. So Jesus is here, to make it better. What happens to the pure guy? Gets killed. He came and Christianity took off. What would be the worst thing to happen if he didn’t come down? Eve still made Adam eat the fruit and we would all be Muslim. Would that be so unimaginably bad?

A person to be considered normal is expected of to behave ought to a standard, regularity, ordinarily… does this make it really normalitive?

If you believe it, then it must be true, and normal.

What do you think?