I don’t want to be normal. I have gotten past that for the most part, and I know that I would be miserable trying to be a normie. I mean, I try to fit in as best as I can without making it uncomfortable for me, but at the heart of it and me, I would be so much happier if I could just let my freak flag fly.
But I know that I am too much for the gen pop. Even people who don’t consider themselves normies are, for the most part, more normal than I am. Except for the true freaks. I’m not enough on the fringe for them. I’m a weirdo in so many ways, but I’m also straitlaced in that I don’t drink or do drugs. There are many reasons for that, but it makes it difficult for me to fit into the artistic scene.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes, when I’m really down,I wish I was normal. I wish I was not neurodivergent. I wish I was white, and one of the binary gender (cran’t go quite as far as to wish I were a man). I wish I wasn’t a night owl.
By the way, that is so hard to change. I remember being six or seven and stuffing a t-shirt or towel under my door so I could read until midnight. I taught myself to read around age four. I would read until around midnight and then fall asleep. It did not matter what time I went to bed–I just could not sleep until eleven or midnight.
I say this because I know that it’s hard on parents when their kids don’t want to go to bed at what is considered an appropriate time, but it’s no picnic for the kid, either. I will admit that I have shitty bedtime practices, but no matter what I do, I cannot go to bed before midnight. These days, it’s more like 4 or 5 a.m.
The only time I’ve been able to sleep on a normal schedule was after my medical crisis, and I was heavily drugged at the time. And recuperating from dying. When I went to bed a week after waking up, I was still extremely heavily drugged. And very tired. I had no problem going to bed at ten or so and getting up at six. This lasted until the drugs wore off and my parents went back to Taiwan.
Now, I’m back to an opposite-than-normal people sleep schedule, and I’m not happy about it. Mostly, though, because I’m very aware that it’s considered bad/deviant/lazy. Every time I manage to claw my sleep schedule to going to bed at one or so, I can’t keep it up.