My mother was visiting, and we were sitting on the small, green couch in my tiny living room.  I was trying to talk to her about how she could support me and my mental health.  She responded with what she believed was a simple question.  “When was the first time you knew you weren’t ‘normal?’”

Of course, it wasn’t – and isn’t for most people – that simple.  What did normal even mean?  She meant I wasn’t normal because I had a diagnosis, but it made me feel ashamed when she said this, especially as activists and patients are trying hard to reduce or erase the stigma of mental illness.  It seemed she had implied, though perhaps she didn’t mean to, that there was something wrong with me.

Perhaps I always had been different.  As a child, I cried easily.  My mother said she thought I had never smiled enough.  And I remembered being told too often that I was “too sensitive” and “not to take everything so personally.”  It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in college and my best friend tried to commit suicide that signs of clinical depression appeared.  But then, they were at least textbook, something that could be diagnosed – eating and sleeping too little or too much.

Visual hallucinations of my Janice Joplin poster turning into a skeleton.  Crying at almost everything.  Medication and then moving from the East Coast out West seemed to help as I spent the next ten years on medication and trying to make myself happy in other ways – following my dream of being a writer and hiking and backpacking like I had always wanted to.  Then one day, when I believed I was okay, that the past was far behind me, I threw my medication in the garbage, determined that I could be okay without it.

A year later, I was in the mental health wing of a hospital.  A stressful time had taken its toll.  My live-in boyfriend had moved seven hours away, and I had moved out of our house to rent a small apartment though we were still planning to make a long-distance relationship work.  Suddenly, I wasn’t sleeping.  I was paranoid and believed the downstairs neighbors in the duplex I was renting were trying to kill me.  I swore I could hear them talking about me and planning their attack.  Sure, maybe I am more sensitive to stress than the average person.  Sure, it may not be “normal” to watch a poster turn into a horror image or “hear” your neighbor talking through the walls, but it felt like this idea of these weaknesses or experiences making me “not normal” diminished everything about me.

I was a published writer, a teacher.  I had friends – even the ones who drove me to the hospital – who didn’t see me as abnormal or less than whole.  Instead, they saw that I was having a hard time, that the reaction I’d had to my boyfriend leaving was maybe not a common one, but it was a valid one, and with the right help, I would be okay.  And did it matter if I was happy all the time?  Would I be able to write those searching personal essays if I was?  Probably not.  It takes all types to make this world, and what kind of world would we have if we were all striving towards “normal?”  What about the idea that we all bring something others can learn from? Or that it only makes life that much more rich to be aware of the variety of ways people experience it?  Isn’t that a healthier perspective?