A fun thing about having been raised as a middle-class, white, AMAB who is also at least a touch self-aware, is that any time I have, what I believe to be, a profound thought, I have to stop and wonder if it actually is profound.

Over time I’ve learned that men are in our culture so regularly spout the most mundane takes ever, and act like they’re Socrates. I’m aware of this, and yet I myself will find myself having a thought, and be like, “damn, that’s really impactful. I should tell other people about this.” I’ll then bring this up with my partner who will swiftly let me know that, yeah, that’s neat, but a lot of people figured this out a long time ago. Now, they don’t tell me this just to knock me down a peg, they just want to make sure I don’t go around embarassing myself.

A side effect of this, though, is that now when I have something I think is profound, I’ll spend a week pondering on it to try and figure out if I’m not just making a mountain out of a mole hill.

The Catalyst

What influenced me to write the beginning of this post was an idea I had while driving home from work yesterday. I can never perceive my own life as “normal” because “normal” is just an average, and any one thing compared against the average will always stand out.

Stranded

Something that causes me a great deal of emotional pain is that I cannot experience your life. You, reader, are a separate person from me, just as I am a separate person from you. We may share stories with each other, but we can never truly experience each other’s lives. And because I can never experience your life, or my partner’s life, or that guy at the busstop’s life, I always feel abnormal.

I’ll stop here, because I think I do want to write a full post about this…