“It’s okay” and “It’s normal” have been some of my favorite sentences recently. The more and more I uncover from the past on my path of growth, the more comes up that I previously had good reasons to hide. Things that I was afraid of, things I was ashamed of, things I considered weird or crazy or even simply not normal. Growing up it was crucial to be normal to be safe, I really wanted to be normal, to fit in, without in the end really understanding what that meant. Growing up in my family set me up for being different and even as a child I saw that. I saw how I was different, treated differently, behaving differently than other kids. And it hurt, and it still does. So I desperately tried to be normal, pushing all those things down that I didn’t see other people do, other kids do. Just keep up the small part that seemed normal or acceptable, or how others behaved.
Now, as I progress in healing and growth the parts that I suppressed when I was younger come up. It’s those parts where I’ve been wronged or where no one taught me before that they belonged to a human being. Things that were not talked about, not shown in my family growing up. Things that so often are only shown in private, around people you trust. Things where my parents should have validated and allowed that experience for me. But no one did that for me. And so now I’m doing it for myself.
I tell myself that the experiences and feelings that come up are human and normal and okay, teaching myself that it’s not something to be afraid or ashamed of. That it’s safe enough and okay to experience them and slowly, if I feel ready, share them with people I trust now. I feel lucky that there are people out there, e.g. on social media, normalizing those experiences when the people who raised me could not. It’s seeing that others go through the same that I can allow myself to accept, de-shame and process what was invalidated for so long. It’s allowing the pain, the grief, the anger and the joy, the fun, the excitement, the dreams. In the end it’s teaching myself what human experience means.
Also, it doesn’t matter if it’s objectively normal or human, there’s nothing such as objectivity in this case. For every way of looking at it, you will find a human who does it exactly this way. For me, it’s healing what was unjustly invalidated or not allowed throughout my childhood, things I felt but could not safely express and allowing those parts and emotions to have a share in my life again, to be expressed again. And I think it makes my life richer again, more colourful, and less filled with shame and fear. Those sentences are so simple but they mean so much.
What do you make normal for yourself today?