Why the word “normal” was never meant to describe a soul like yours — or mine.
I’m not normal. And honestly? Thank goodness.
I’m writing this from Rimini, where the Adriatic wind carries that faint salt tang through my window, and I’ve been turning a single sentence over in my mind all morning: “I know that I am not normal… and it’s beautiful.” It sounds simple. It isn’t. That sentence is a quiet revolution, the kind you whisper to yourself before you dare say it out loud.
Before we go further, a small note from me, Gerd: I’ll simplify some psychological and philosophical ideas here so the heart of the message stays clear. No jargon, no performance — just honest thinking between us.
The Lie We Were Sold About “Normal”
Somewhere along the way, someone sold us the idea that “normal” equals “good.” That fitting in is safety, and standing out is a glitch. But look closer — “normal” is a statistical average, not a moral achievement. It’s a middle point on a graph, nothing more.
As Lady Gaga once put it, “It’s OK to be weird. And maybe your weird is my normal. Who’s to say? I think it’s an attitude.” She’s onto something enormous there. Normal is a costume we borrow, not a skin we’re born in.
And the writer Reiko said something even sharper: “What makes us the most normal is knowing that we’re not normal.” Read that twice. The only honest thing any of us share is our strangeness.
Why “Not Fitting In” Is Actually the Point
I’ve spent a lot of my life not fitting in. The wheelchair makes that visible. But before the chair, before the surgeries, before the diagnosis with a name most people can’t pronounce — I already wasn’t fitting in. I was a kid from Albania dropped into Italy, learning a new language through cartoons and stubbornness. Nothing about me slotted neatly anywhere.
Then one day I realised something: the slot wasn’t the goal.
Jodi Chapman writes it beautifully — “To all ‘abnormals’ who may feel they can’t or don’t fit in: YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO FIT IN! You are uniquely, Divinely YOU! Embrace it!” I’d tattoo that on the inside of my eyelids if I could. Because fitting in asks you to shave off the parts that make you interesting. And those parts — the jagged ones, the tender ones, the ones you thought were defects — those are where your whole life lives.
The Beauty Part — The Word That Changes Everything
Here’s where the original sentence does its magic. It doesn’t stop at “I’m not normal.” It adds “and it’s beautiful.” That little conjunction is the whole therapy session.
Most of us can admit we’re odd. Fewer can call the oddness beautiful. We’ll accept ourselves grudgingly — the way you accept a rainy Tuesday — without ever celebrating what we are. But a life lived grudgingly is a very long afternoon.
One writer put it this way: if more of us embraced the truth of not being normal, “the world would be not only more just — but far more beautiful.” Justice and beauty in the same breath. That tracks. When people stop punishing themselves for being different, they stop punishing others too.
What Science Quietly Taught Me About This
Here’s a small confession from my astronomy days. The universe has no interest in “normal.” Stars don’t apologise for being red giants instead of yellow dwarfs. Galaxies don’t try to look like their neighbours. Every interesting thing in physics — every breakthrough, every new particle, every signal we’ve ever picked up — arrived as an anomaly first. Something that didn’t fit.
The cosmos is built out of beautiful irregularities. So are you.
A Quiet Practice for the Days You Forget
On hard days — and I have them, the kind where my body won’t cooperate and my brain joins the protest — I do something small. I name one thing about me that isn’t normal, and I refuse to call it a flaw. Just for that moment. Just as an experiment.
Sometimes it’s the way I overthink a single sentence for forty minutes. Sometimes it’s the wheelchair and the life it’s given me, not the life it’s taken. Andrea Hanson writes that “we’re all just humans, living our lives the best way we know how. And that feels amazing.” She’s right. The best way we know how — not the best way anyone else approves of.
That’s the practice. That’s the whole thing.
What Comes Next
If you’ve read this far, I suspect you’ve been carrying around your own version of “I’m not normal” for a while. Maybe it’s loud. Maybe it’s a whisper under everything you do. I’d like to offer you the rest of the sentence today: and it’s beautiful.
Say it out loud once. See what your chest does.
The future — for you, for me, for this small stubborn project called FreeAstroScience — belongs to the people who stopped apologising for being unusual and started building with it. Science needs those people. Culture needs them. The world, honestly, is starving for them.
So be gloriously, specifically, unapologetically not normal. The universe already is. You’re just catching up.
Never give up — especially on the parts of you that refuse to fit.
— Gerd, from a slightly windy afternoon in Rimini
