Rising Rooted

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So much suffering begins with a quiet, corrosive question:

What’s wrong with me?

Not because something is inherently broken, but because most of us were raised inside systems that treat difference as a problem to solve. If you were too sensitive, too intense, too restless, too emotional, too slow, too much—or not enough in the “right” ways—there is a good chance you learned to measure yourself against a standard that was never built to hold real human variety.

And that standard has a name.

We call it “normal.”

But normal is not some timeless truth waiting to be discovered. It is a story. A statistical construct. A cultural spell. And for many people, healing begins the moment that spell starts to loosen.

Because your uniqueness is not pathology.

And the qualities you were taught to hide may be carrying the very medicine, creativity, and perspective this world most needs.

How “Normal” Was Invented

“Normal” did not begin as a moral truth. It began as math.

In the 19th century, statistics gave us averages—mean, median, mode. At first, these were simply tools for measuring patterns in populations. But over time, the average body, the average mind, the average behaviour began to take on more weight than they should have.

Average stopped meaning common.

It started to mean correct.

And once that happened, deviation became suspect. Psychology and medicine began organizing themselves around this fiction, treating the average as an ideal and difference as deficiency.

What gets called “evidence-based” often carries the same problem. Much of modern research has been built on WEIRD populations—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. A narrow slice of humanity, repeatedly studied and then generalized as though it reflects us all.

That is not neutrality.

That is a local worldview dressed up as universal truth.

Why “Normal” Serves Power

Colonial systems do not thrive on complexity. They thrive on order, predictability, and control.

“Normal” becomes useful in that context because it trains people to conform. To be legible. To be productive in approved ways. To stay within the boundaries of what the dominant culture can recognize and manage.

Difference interrupts that.

Neurodivergence strains standardized education. Queerness unsettles binary roles. Chronic illness resists economies built on constant output. Deep feeling, intuition, cultural difference, nonlinear rhythms—none of these fit neatly inside a worldview that prizes efficiency over aliveness.

So what gets named abnormal is often not a failure of the person.

It is a failure of the system to honour complexity.

Or perhaps more honestly: a refusal.

The Violence of “What’s Wrong With Me?”

I see this wound all the time.

Brilliant, soulful, complicated people sitting across from me, asking some version of the same question:

Why can’t I just be normal?

And the heartbreak is rarely that they are struggling. The heartbreak is that someone taught them to interpret their struggle, their difference, or their intensity as evidence against their worth.

Someone taught them that their song was off-key.

So they quieted it.

But the song is still there.

It hums underneath the coping. Underneath the shame. Underneath the polished version of self they learned to present in order to stay safe, loved, employable, acceptable.

This is not to deny suffering, or to pretend that every pattern is automatically benign. We all have wounds. We all have ways of causing harm that ask for honesty and responsibility. But growth is not the same thing as conformity.

Growth is not becoming more average.

Growth is becoming more fully, consciously yourself.

The Procrustean Bed

There is an old Greek myth about a man named Procrustes, who offered weary travellers a bed for the night.

If they were too short for the bed, he stretched them. If they were too tall, he cut off their limbs.

Either way, the body had to fit the frame.

This is what “normal” does. It trims what exceeds the standard. It strains what doesn’t naturally reach it. It treats the frame as sacred and the person as negotiable.

The myth has survived, perhaps, because it names something enduring and brutal: the violence of forced fit.

We should be suspicious of any system that asks living beings to mutilate themselves in order to belong.

Biodiversity Is Health

Nature offers a very different lesson.

A monocrop may look tidy, but it is fragile. One blight, one pest, one disruption—and the whole system is vulnerable.

A forest, meadow, or wetland is another story. Difference is what makes it resilient. Variation in root systems, flowering times, textures, heights, relationships. Diversity is not decorative. It is structural. It is what allows life to adapt, survive, and regenerate.

The same is true for humans.

Neurodiversity, queerness, body variation, cultural multiplicity, emotional range, spiritual difference—these are not flaws in the system. They are part of what makes any collective life-giving, creative, and capable of responding to change.

If normal is monoculture, then difference is the wild meadow.

And I know which one I trust.

Refusing “Normal,” Reclaiming Your Song

Refusing normal does not have to begin with a grand declaration. Sometimes it begins with a smaller shift.

Not asking, Am I normal?

But asking, Am I here? Am I alive? Am I becoming more myself, or less?

It might mean returning to something you buried because it made you stand out. A style of thinking. A creative impulse. A rhythm your body prefers. A way of loving or speaking or moving that once felt too visible.

It might mean noticing where others saw flaw, and wondering whether there was also gift there all along.

It might mean questioning the metrics you were handed. Asking whose bodies built them, whose stories they leave out, and what other forms of knowledge have endured without their approval.

And it may also mean learning to recognize, and celebrate, difference in others—not as something admirable from a distance, but as something that makes collective life richer, stranger, stronger, and more whole.

What Endures

Our systems may keep trying to sort people into categories that feel manageable. It will keep rewarding neatness, sameness, and compliance.

But life itself keeps resisting.

It grows sideways. It mutates. It improvises. It becomes more itself through variation, not less.

So perhaps the work is not to become normal.

Perhaps the work is to become trustworthy to your own nature. To stop cutting yourself down to fit a frame that was never made with you in mind. To let your difference ripen into contribution. To remember that what made you feel out of place may also be what makes you necessary.

Not despite your strangeness.

Because of it.

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If this spoke to something in you, there are a few paths you can follow from here:

Each door leads somewhere different. It is my hope that all of them lead back to you.

<3 Rachel