Normal Doesn't Exist.

And it never did.

A standard. Something usual. Something expected.

And yet — expected by whom? Standard according to what? Usual in which world, in which century, in which moment of a history that has never once stopped moving?

Normal exists in mathematics. In statistics. In the kind of precision that requires a fixed reference point to function.

But you are not a number. And life has no fixed reference point.

Normal has always been a moving target.

One hundred years ago, it was not normal to stare into a glowing screen for eight hours a day. Not normal to speak to an artificial intelligence. Not normal for a woman to own a business, travel alone, or choose not to marry.

Two hundred years ago, it was normal for women to wear only skirts. Normal to have ten children. Normal to never leave the village where you were born.

Normal has always been just a photograph of a moment — a snapshot of what most people happened to do at a particular point in time. It was never a rule. It was never a truth. It was just a majority opinion, dressed up as a standard.

Why would you shape your life around something that changes with every generation?

I spent years trying to be less.

As a child, I was a lot. Too joyful. Too intense. Too interested in too many things at once. I thought too much, too widely, too deeply — and I could see it in people’s eyes: this is too much.

So I turned it down. I made myself smaller. I learned the unspoken rules of normal and tried, very hard, to follow them.

And I want you to know something about what that costs.

Everything you suppress in order to be acceptable to others does not disappear. It waits. It becomes a weight you carry without knowing you are carrying it. And one day — sometimes years later — you have to do the difficult, often painful work of finding it again. Of unlearning the smallness. Of convincing yourself that what you were told was too much was, in fact, exactly enough.

The things you hide to become normal become the limiting beliefs you spend years trying to dismantle.

So if I could say one thing to the child I was:

Be exactly as you are. You are not too much. You are precisely enough. And the people who cannot hold your fullness — let them go. They were never your people.

Normal was always a cage with an open door.

You were never required to walk in. You simply were not told the door was open.

Now you know.

With Love and Elegance,

Maria ☙