I had two pieces of really good news yesterday. The first was that the tests on my heart over the past couple of months have meant that the cardiac unit are happy to discharge me. No more heart tests just periodic blood tests and, to be honest, if I didn’t have to take the medications, I’m not sure I would believe that I’d even had a heart attack. The other good news was that my Skool platform with my business partner has reached almost 150 members less than two months after it was launched.
I am thrilled by both of these things. In order to reach 150 members, I have had to put myself ‘out there’ on TikTok with my business partner. I have had to open up to my psychic medium gifts and utilise them publicly, providing, hopefully, help and support to other people with them. It has been part of the metamorphosis that started, I suppose, three years ago nearly. Some of which was intentional, some of it not but all of it has led me to where I am now which I am not unhappy about necessarily. Getting to know the real me has been quite the journey!
In getting to know the real me, I have realised how small I have made myself in the past. How I made myself small in order to fit into the perception of ‘normal’, a perception I now completely challenge. What is ‘normal’? Who defines it and what gives them the right to do so? I now know I am ADHD, possibly AuDHD, and I remember as a child feeling different. That I didn’t fit in with the other children. I realise now that was likely because of my psychic medium gifts and my AuDHD (not that such a diagnosis existed when I was young) and so I did what a good many others did and masked my ‘difference’. I spent decades forcing myself into this perception of ‘normality’, contorting myself into attempting to be ‘neuro-typical’ and feeling an utter failure because, quite simply, I was not built that way.
But exactly what is ‘normal’ and ‘typical’? Can they even be defined? Because who decided what is ‘normal’ and ‘typical’? Can what we call neuro-diversity be ‘normal’ and ‘typical’? It infuriates me! Because ‘normal’ and ‘typical’ are like perfection I think – they don’t exist. They are not possible.
If we look to nature, we can see that everything is unique. Nothing is the same. Look at the simple snowflake – each one has its own unique signature when studied under the microscope. Look at the animal kingdom, even amongst a group of the exact same species you will see individual personalities and physical differences. Even identical twins have defining features, no matter how small, physically that differentiates them and have differences in their personalities even if only slight. Look at the plant world, a closer examination of a flower would show that it is not identical to the one next to it. So, why do we force ourselves to all be the same? To be ‘normal’? There is no such thing.
In the process of enforcing ‘normal’ we have created mental health difficulties. You can’t tell me they didn’t exist before, we just didn’t talk about them. Children suffered from mental health challenges but they weren’t allowed to be open about them. Yes, things like social media and modern technology enhances mental health problems and feelings of loneliness, but having mental ill-health is not a new phenomenon. We just talk about it now, which is a good thing. And one of the reasons why we have had mental health problems is implicitly making children feel there is something ‘wrong’ with them if they don’t fit the ‘normal’ mould.
I have often spoken of my son’s experience with mainstream schooling. Where he was made to feel that he was stupid and below-average intelligence, particularly in Maths, because rote learning does not suit him. Now, a child who can understand and complete analytical Maths to the level of a 12 year old at the age of 7 cannot be stupid nor of below-average intelligence. But they focused on the fact that the rote learning aspect of his abilities was at that of a 6 year old. Rather than consider how he might benefit from being taught differently, they tried to force him down a route that did not suit his learning abilities. I remember another mother telling me her daughters were not clever enough for the school they all attended – when the likelihood was, they were. They just needed to learn differently.
I firmly believe that we are all born with equal levels of intelligence but that we are born with different ways of absorbing and interpreting information. We have different skills and talents. A child who can rote learn, absorb the information spoken to them on a range of subjects and regurgitate it in an examination to promptly forget it again is no more intelligent than a child who absorbs huge volumes of data on one subject, knows that subject inside out and can relate it to other subjects in a way that means they learn the other subjects also. It’s just a different mode of learning. But one that is not tolerated in the school system, and so children learn to feel stupid and that there is something ‘wrong’ with them. How does that benefit anyone’s mental health? How does that help create people able to take their place in society? It doesn’t. It creates people who make themselves small.
Just imagine a world where people are completely accepted for who they are. Who are not made to feel that being different is wrong. Imagine a world where people don’t make themselves feel small because they aren’t ‘normal’ but where they are celebrated, allowed to be who they are with all their natural talents and abilities brought to the fore and benefiting society. Isn’t that the world we want to live in? That bright, colourful, diverse, beautiful world? Where who knows who doesn’t get to say what is ‘acceptable’ and what isn’t.
Because normal does not exist no more than perfection does. There is no such thing as typical. There is only unique individualism which should be celebrated and enabled in the context of a collective consciousness that doesn’t discriminate.
That’s the kind of world I want to live in. One that I want to help create so that my son can be exactly who he is and not made to feel small.
Louisa Simpson 