The facade of normality

 

I've never suffered from imposter syndrome because I have thought, felt or known that we are all imposters. We are all great pretenders at this game called reality. We are back in the state sanctioned reality of normality now because pandemic restrictions are being lifted. We can come and go as we please again. We can sit in beer gardens looking at other people behind sunglasses with resentment slowly getting pissed on bottles of Grolsch and marinating our own internal self hate and poison. Please don't pretend that this doesn't happen to you. We must stop pretending to be normal. Normal is a social construct that has condemned many to long spells in prisons and mental institutions over the years. Normality prescribed in Scripture. If you want to know what normality is go and ask a priest or a vicar.  Royalty, we could go and ask them what normality is. They seem pretty regular Joes don't they? Divorce, Sexual Misdemeanors, Separation, Gold Crowns & oodles of disposable income. 

We don't really need police because we police ourselves. Would there be more murders, violent and sexual crimes if there were no police? They only come in to mop up after the event. They don't prevent crime. The biggest police person is the one in our own minds. We are so rigid that we can only relax and 'misbehave' in state sanctioned formats. Festivals & Gigs that we have been deprived of because of Covid. We may return to Glastonbury Fields Forever but the residue of this past year will remain. People will be thinking about social distancing, hand cleansing and masking up rather than relaxing. The little authoritarian gremlin will be there to beat our subconscious into submission. Perhaps this is what they call repression.   

Where do we get our first impression of normality? From our peer group in an educational setting perhaps? Things might be crazy at home but we have the disciplined normality of school to keep us in check during daylight hours or we did before the lockdown and then it became false normal behaviour by zoom. All those faces  looking at eachother behind deadpan eyes, hiding all emotion, communicating like state sanctioned robots apart from the Handforth Parish Council meeting where the adults let it all hang out.

What saddens me as I get older is my loss of spontaneity. I police myself to a cautionary standstill because past behaviour has led me to the conclusion that spontaneity and impulsivity can land you in hot water and this is what I mean about the internal policeman. It's probably an age thing. From thinking that you were invincible in your early twenties to realising that you are twenty years away from death in your fifties if you are lucky.

Life is a great pretence. Normality prescribes and proscribes our behaviour with a seven day week. Substances on a Friday and Saturday night to get out of it and then the giant come down on Sunday before getting up to scrape a living from Monday to Thursday. You are not really thinking about your work on a Friday are you?

I write this as a man who has been unemployed for 16 years.  I have been an unpaid carer for perhaps six of those years and normal society does not recognise caring as a regular or conventional way of living. You are passive and reactive, not productive. Before I began my six year caring adventure I wrote an ebook which I should really update now but you can read it here for free. It was an attempt to convince myself that normality was insanity and the way that we had been herded into this way of living was causing mental and emotional distress on an industrial scale. It is survival of the fittest in our normal society and the fittest are the ones with the most inherited money and the most contacts and with the ruthless eye on the prize of power and wealth.  Carers don't count but you already knew that before reading this blog post.