“If you are always trying to be normal, you may never know how amazing you can be.”

-Maya Angelou

Each one of us is made of the most unique combination of cells, thoughts and personalities. I know I say it all the time, in different words but always the same meaning; and I am not scared of repeating myself because I truly believe so.
In light of this acknowledgement (or fact), it is only fair to say that we all have something that makes us stand out, in our own small and big ways, in this crowd of a 7.7 billion (and counting, literally!).
Lets proceed for once with the assumption, as the base, that you agree with my belief and believe in my thought too.

“I think every person has their own identity and beauty.
Everyone being different is what is really beautiful. If we were all the same, it would be boring.”

-Tila Tequila

With such uniqueness and distinctiveness, the world should be a ball of creativity, bursting with ideas; and yet there seems to be an increased need and pressure to be different and also difficulty in achieving the status of standing out from the rest.
Isn’t that intriguing? Isn’t that something worth being curious about?
There have been days I’ve had conversations at length, with myself or with the forces of this world and found myself increasingly lost rather than at peace.

E.E. Cummings once said that “To be nobody but yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human can ever fight and never stop fighting”.
Why do we have to struggle and battle for something that has been given to each one of us, so unconditionally?

Could it be that a select few, whom we know nothing of, have created a divide between crazy and acceptable?
We are usually so scared of accepting anything that isn’t what the majority follows that we label, shame and stereotype them. I’m not talking about the big taboos, I’m hinting at the smaller habits of everyday life, the hobbies one wishes to pursue, the things that one doesn’t like, the chores that the family divides, the way we address our kids or the things that we strongly say NO to without even a thought.

It’s funny how the normalcy that everyone wants to achieve is defined by someone we’ve never met and cannot quote. Its interesting how the world demands uniqueness and we are eager to judge the ones who are different and readily abandon them. And miraculously, we are coerced into being like everybody while still holding the volcanic potential of being somebody.
So, is normalcy what we achieve when we can’t achieve what we independently and personally want to achieve??
Isn’t it ironical?

Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with.”

-Murakami

Come on, I know we live in a society. And in order to survive we have to co-exist. And in order to co-exist we need harmony. And for harmony we need to co-ordinate or just be more alike.
But could it hurt so much to just replace our straight ‘No’ into a waited silence to hear them out??
After all, there is strength in diversity!

*The population estimate has been taken from World Population Clock