…Is frightening to say the least. Leave it unleashed and it obliterates your very existence, but what can tame it – social conditioning, aligning to what others define as “normal” and “acceptable”?
What happens when the chemical concoctions brewing in your brain refuse to assimilate in the proportion they need to for you to be deemed fit for community living?
How do you disassociate with what your psyche perceives as real and ally with what the people around you see?
We as a society are intolerant to any behavior that we recognize “different” from what has been understood as the norm. We are so insecure about our fragile social constructs of “normalcy” that the minute a person behaves even slightly tangential to what we are “used to”, we go on the defensive – our first reaction is to protect ourselves, and the second to “judge” - brandish the person as “mentally challenged” or “flawed in personality or character”.
The more sympathetic among us try to derive logical reasons, try to “sort” thing out, try to find a “cure”.
But, none of us “accept” and “include”.
Our rigid set-ups do not make allowances for an overactive imagination, for a passionately fiery spirit, for an individual who might have a different arrangement of molecules in the grey matter in their system.
Each one of us is unique - yet only to a limited extent, after which we all “conform”. The price for non-conformance is too huge to pay – alienation from society – friends and family.
Like everything else in life, there are no easy solutions to the exclusivity we all practice as part of community living. Acceptance must begin at home, at the level of the family unit. That is our only hope.
(I have not been able to coherently string together the many thoughts that a close association with one such powerfully distinctive mind evoked in me a while back – But, I finally decided to publish this long pending draft to share with you the frustration at our inability to assimilate variations into mainstream – forget assimilation, we refuse to acknowledge the rights of “differently” constructed individuals to lead a normal life – we just give up on them, we subject them to indifference or anger – pushing them into greater depths of estrangement – we make them pay for what is out of their control – the mind – the omnipotent mind that is above the individual.)
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