Threads Of Hope

Threads Of Hope

Diverging From The Norm

A personal essay on why I believe there is no such thing as "normal"

Emma-Jane Barlow's avatar
Emma-Jane Barlow
Jul 30, 2025
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I have spent my whole life colouring outside the lines. Despite my best efforts to belong and be deemed “normal” by others, I have never quite managed it, no matter how much I masked or acted like everyone else. The fact is, you can’t change a heart. And my heart has always had a unique rhythm; I’ve always felt things more deeply, and “normal” was an ill-fitting costume that was never designed to fit me.

"Normal" is a word we throw around like it's a virtue. Act normal. Look normal. Be normal. But what does it even mean to be normal? Who decided what normal is? I’ll tell you who, man. Normal is a societal construct created to divide people and measure our worth; it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Human beings tend to categorise things and put them into boxes to make sense of them. But we are people, not boxes. The fluidity and complexity of every human on this planet is as vast and ever-changing as the ocean. We are chaos and colour, nuance and movement. Not somethi…

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