this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I've accepted that everyone's mentally ill to a degree, we just pretend to be "normal"
Neurodivergence doesn't necessarily need to mean mentally ill
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the whole point of that term is to convey the idea that those people aren’t broken, they’re just different from typical people. And in a society dominated by those with what are now “neurodivergent” minds, they’d be the typical “normal” people.
Funnily though, the very definition of many of the disorders specifically state that they are a significant departure from the norm that cause some kind of life impairment.
So what we’re really saying is, stop treating us like shit and using words that describe us and turning them into derogatory words.
Except, it’s human nature to not be very accepting of people we see as different from us. So I guess we’ll just keep playing these stupid semantic games.
And in a way there is no "normal" to begin with. No one describes or thinks of themselves as "normal" when asked. Everyone in some way or another wishes they could just be Normal. "Normal" is what everyone else is, but not who any one specific person is - it's generally unachievable in a literal sense.
That's why I prefer to use average.
Or even easier..typical.
Or, the norm… normal
In many ways, being able to pretend is the definition. The normal is a game that works for many people, a shared arrangement that keeps the lights on. But the normal has now grown for millennia and it’s become a personality of its own, and that personality views the myriad personalities as threats to itself. Hence we don’t just follow protocol to trade and handle tasks, we follow it in every moment of our lives, and we can only safely express the non-common part, the insane part, when we’re out away from the group.
These days the operations protocol refuses to coexist with the personal styles, except it strictly defined containers where variation is permitted and encouraged.
Actually "normal" conceptually has not been around for millenia, it's origin is actually only roughly three to four hundred years old and came about during the period where societies started industrializing and jobs began having more specific requirements for whom they hired. Prior to that there wasn't really any idea of what a "normal" person was. Differently abled people were quite regular as losing function to injury, infection or disease was very common and not really seen as creating a different class of person. There's evidence of people who had pretty impairing birth defects like fused limbs who were obviously soldiers or hard labourers given their physical development. Personal mental oddities in the absence of the field of psychology categorizing things were just chalked up to being the way that person was and the way people were was myriad.
In English the word "normal" came into being in the tail end of the 17th century and was borrowed off the word for a 90 degree carpenter square to mean "theoretically fit for all kinds of work" . It's entirely a recent social invention in the grand scheme of things.
Normal is basically the average of everything most people do... so 🤷🏻♂️