What is different? deviation from the norm? What is it that determines what is “normal”? When did it begin to be something that can be called “normal” or “abnormal”?
Approximately from we are pushed out through the birth canal, we are attempted placed in boxes. Tried “figured out”. Our parents worry, hope, and wish only for the children that they will “fit in”, find their place in one of the available “boxes”. The problem for many, however, comes when the “boxes” are so narrow that nobody fits. Not like halfway once, so that you at least, can somewhat drag yourself through life in the system’s eye of how you should do it. In the face of people out there, many get a sense of question marks around them, against them. Which in turn leads one to question oneself. Doubt oneself. You are not being figured out. And, when you are not figured out, it is concluded that there are you there is something wrong with.
At the slightest sign of “deviation”, we get a stamp, a diagnosis. Many of us sitting in the end with a bunch of diagnoses, perhaps a disability benefit in hand, and often a debt from here to the stars and back. For, the “deviant” are the loser in society. Even as many as we are. There is no room to be “un-average”. You are squeezed out. Unable. Everything is going so fast, in a certain way, and if you can not keep up, – too bad for you.
The thing is, that i, we, are actually happy for these diagnoses. One feels a little more understood, finally gets a “box”, or five.
The diagnoses do help. Society has the urge to place us. It’s a human thing in itself, but which can seem as becomes even stronger when we are very numerous, and escapes beyond. Or, when society becomes too much based on logical, rational thinking with the brain, and less thinking with the hearts.
The experience of feeling “understood”, is so reassuring, that i will take anything. But, the truth is that these diagnoses do not make us understood. Not really. Not as we need it to be. You have gotten a box, but the box is a sick box. You are still on the outside, still not within.
You are sick if you do not fit in, and healthy and well if you do. However, is it not the society that is the ill one, when so many get sick of it? When so many people do not “fit”? When so many people feel useless and alone.
If one is treated as if one is sick, one also will be sick.
As children we do not come with questionmarks, not in the judgemental way. We are who we are, others are who they are, and that is good. Unless they are mean. That is how the child’s world is working – you do not, yourself, think about being “different”, we all are just us, before being told so, directly or indirectly. That is because we are not different.
If we are able to focus more on capabilities and opportunities for the individual, and for us all together, instead of limitations and differences, everyone can get a place, a space – equivalent to the next.
“Different” do not exist.
Only diversity exists