Today, I decided to hang out after class with a couple friends (yes, I actually have a social life! Smh) in a computer lab in school. One of them started to play music from a band I've never heard before and if the music wasn't already weird, she began to wave her hands in the air all crazy-like to it. I mean, this girl is the same friend who I've been hanging out with since my first semester in college. The same person who obsesses over anime and manga even more than myself. The same girl who spends endless hours learning the lyrics to anime intro songs and who is pratically like a Japanese culture dictionary. So, I wasn't startled at all when she started grooving to the weirdest music I've heard in a while. However, my other friend wasn't. 

 

He wasn't used to this side of her. He swore that she was the kind of person who kept to herself and whose world was closed off to the general public. This actually started a debate about whether or not the person we decided to show to the world was the person we truly are. Eventually, we all agreed that you can't exactly know who a person is by judging them on how they look or behave without becoming their friend. When you become friends with a person, they get comfortable around you...comfortable enough to wave their hands around wildly when they play their favourite music. They become comfortable enough to be themselves.

 

After the discussion, I turned to my crazy friend and told her that being weird and unusual is so common for us that it's become our kind of normal. That's when the concept of normalcy in groups became even more distinct to me than before. Just like the two women who had two separate opinions about my "Beware of Humans" shirt because of their social groups, to my friend and I our behaviour to accept the unique has become our norm while my other friend considered our behaviour "weird". 

 

The more I delve into the world of the normies is the more I come to appreciate how awesome and diverse it actually is.