Is anyone really normal?

Reading the text regarding creativity and disease, I paused in wonderment at the power that is within us. The senses that we are equipped with are truly amazing! In those moments of quite pause, I have asked myself what sense would I be able to live without… I know maybe I am abnormal! So, I was very intrigued to read the accounts from individuals who lost or were born without a particular sense. James Joyce said that becoming blind was “the least important event in his life.” For me this was a humbling statement as so often we bitch and complain about every little thing taking for granted the gifts we have in our senses. OK I am stepping off my soap box…

I mentioned my friends Mom in an earlier blog and I thought of her again as I read the sections on depression and mental illness. It is concerning that we as a society are accepting of other diseases yet those we cannot understand we categorize them as being mad. Your head can get sick the same way your heart does… The text mentions the notion that individuals who don’t fit in are categorized as strange. In the reading it describes the introduction of lithium… Mrs. K is prescribed lithium and she sits in a chair and stares like a zombie… She is a brilliant woman who has an advanced degree. Yet she is unable to cope with the day to day. So this chapter hit home for me and further opens my thinking about the power of the mind.

I have migraines from time to time – they are the worst! So as I read the notion of an aura surrounding these headaches it became much clearer for me what I have experienced. Now I will say that I don’t have euphoric feelings as the book describes, but I do become hyper sensitive to smells – it is the wildest thing!

I think that we are all eccentric in varying degrees... The degrees are determined by society - and who's to say that the accepted standard of normalcy is correct?