Will I Ever Be Normal?

A program friend was telling me that she likes a certain tv show, except for the fact that at the end, while the credits are beginning to roll, they always break out the booze, in celebration. She went on for a good two minutes in a mini-rant about always needing alcohol to mark achievments, yada yada yada...when she wound down, I asked her why she didn't just switch channels before it reached that point in the show?

She gazed at me for a moment, mouth pursed, brow furrowed, before she burst out laughing - this had truly never entered her head as a option. When she calmed down from her laughing fit, she asked half-jokingly, "Will I ever be normal?"

I asked her, "Who cares? Why strive for conformity, or "normality," when instead, you can strive to be the best version of yourself, with all your attendant quirks and interesting personality traits? We don't love you for your proximity to an artificial baseline of behavior, decreed as "normal;"  we love you for the delightful difference of you."

She grinned at me, saying "Can you repeat that in one-syllable words, please? (She likes to puncture my pomposity, this friend)
She went on to say thoughtfully, "I like that, the delightful difference of me."

In my journey in 12-Step, when I have tried to force myself into an arbitrary category, I've ended up bruised around the edges, because there are all these bits of me that do not fit, and cannot be squashed into that tiny spot of "acceptably normal." I spent too many years feeling like some wierdo misfit, because I couldn't make myself feel or think or want what I believed I was supposed to.

Today, I'm working towards not trying to fit myself into any standard but the one with my name on it. The one that I've designed, with the help of Al-Anon, and my Higher Power.

Now if I can just reach a place where I'm willing to let each and every other person on the face of God's green earth do the same, with no input from me, that would be Heaven, don't you think?