Thinking about mind and self
Riffing off posts by rachelmanija here and the one she links to by telophase here.
I sometimes wonder if anyone feels 'normal'; and therefore whether there are just people who are better at walking the walk of normal than others and don't reveal their sense of 'OMG am different'.
I have quoted before Michel Faber's brilliant apercu:
Normal doesn't exist; everyone is vulnerable and peculiar.
(from Q&A interview compiled by Rosanna Greenstreet, The Guardian, Saturday January 4, 2003)
Some years ago at a conference on European Cultures of Sexuality someone was talking about research which had indicated that gay people had had a sense of somehow 'being different' from early childhood.
To which I responded asking whether there was a control group of people who did not grow up to become gay, because in my admittedly limited and anecdotal personal experience, but drawing on quite a lot of literary evidence, a large number of individuals go through childhood feeling different in some way, possibly an alien discovered in a pod in the back garden.
I.e. isn't it quite common to feel not entirely part of the herd: indeed, do many people think happily that they are just one of the happy horde? Or do they feel with a combination of anxiety and pride that they are 'not like the others'?
The inside and the outside don't look alike: I once had someone tell me I was 'so self-possessed' because with me shyness goes to silence, while their manifestation was babbling.
This may tie in somehow with Imposter Syndrome?